Argo is now running. A fresh install. Of Woody. Wiped. Formatted. Newly recreated. Now running.

Where shall I even begin this ridiculous tale?

Well, I suppose you could say this mess started this morning, when I did my nice little apt-get upgrade. The usual complement of new versions of Woody packages came down the pipe. Incidentally, this also happened to include some X related packages.

I had gotten the debs of X4 last week, as soon as they entered the main Woody tree. I just let them install, clobbering my earlier tarball/cvs combo install. That all seemed to go well last week. (Except the Mesa DRI accelleration stuff somehow got hosed. Ho hum.) I thought, "Great! I have managed to beat the fates. I had XFree 3 debs, which I clobbered with X4 tarballs, which I piled CVS 3d drivers on top of, which were later unwittingly wiped by X4 debs from apt. And it works! Unbelievable! The gods have been good to me."

Not so fast, buddy.

Today, all of this insanity finally caught up to me at Argo's expense. I don't know how. I still don't know why. I don't even want to. After today's upgrade, X simply would NOT start. It was a minor revision. The X4 debs were already in place. Just a stupid little version change. Somehow, things totally broke.

Every time I tried to start the X server, I got a cold freeze. Total lockup.

I tried using old kernel builds. I tried using new kernel versions. I tried taking out 3d accelleration. I tried adding it back in. I tried reinstalling the debs. Every time: startx, wait a few seconds, black screen, caps lock light on keyboard stops responding, dead. Hard reset. Wait (and sometimes assist) while fsck does its thing.

I even tried going back and installing the X4 tarballs again! Same result. Something had become seriously fscked!

At around 1800, I collapsed from exhaustion and frustration, and took a nap. Woke up a few minutes later when bouncing inquired as to whether the DSL was down. Doh.

I decided that for the moment, I would return Illian to its former position as the router until the mess could be sorted out.

I knew what I had to do. Really, deep down in my heart of hearts, I've known this day would have to come ever since I made the decision to clobber my X3 debs with the X4 tarballs. Reformat and reinstall.

Leave /home and /usr/local alone. Those would be remounted on the new install as if nothing had touched them.

Everything else, wipe and start from scratch. And so I did.

I debated with myself whether to try to preserve the /var partition, or reformat it as well. I decided that in the interest of maintaining the integrity of the package database, it would be better to reinstall. (I really wasn't sure, but I didn't think it would hurt anyway.) I backed up my entire /var/lib/postgres directory to /home so my web database would be preserved. But there was something else I forgot.

Made myself some boot floppies. When I was sure I had it all planned out nice and safe, I inserted the Potato rescue floppy, edited the BIOS boot settings, and let it do its thing. Went through the new install setup. It came time to format /dev/hda6 (/), the "Are you sure?" dialog popped up. This was the point of no return. I hit Y. And for the rest of the needed partitions. (Making absolutely sure to leave the /home and /usr/local alone. ESPECIALLY /home.)

Ran the install. Got base potato going. All was well. The usual steps. Simple enough.

After it rebooted and basic options were set, I immediately switched the /etc/apt/sources.list to point to Woody before proceeding further. Then, it was back to dselect update the available packages, and grab this, that, and everything else that looked interesting again. My ETA for the initial round of downloading turned out to be about an hour plus 40 minutes. Over the DSL line. (Although the pipe on my end was only half saturated at most.)

This was at around 2100. I sat back for a while, ate, watched a music video or two. (I've deliberately skipped over my American Beauty viewing last night + director's commentary this morning, because well, one topic at a time...) Read some more from my occult books. Impatiently wondered if X would again crash even on this install.

The download was nearly complete when I went to watch the weekly xenawarriorprincess ritual. Another quality episode tonight.

I returned to my console at 2330, and proceeded to answer configuration questions for the newly reinstalled packages. Read some more while I waited.

Finally, everything finished unpacking and setting up. Back at the prompt, the very first thing to test.

startx

No freezes. A little mouse funkiness, but a little killall gpm fixed that. Ran dexter again, because I decided I hadn't quite gotten it right the first time. My X session came up fine.

A while back, Jaeger had sent me an email about a mouse wheel configuration parameter, and since I had dumped my old XF86Config file (mostly worthless anyway), I needed to look it up again.

mutt

/var/spool/mail/bitscape: No such file or directory

Wait a sec.... Then it clicked.

ALL my incoming email since... September. WIPED. I had forgotten that in my silliness, I hadn't moved ANY of it to new mbox's since transitioning the mail from Dagobah to Argo. I tried to think of ways I might recover it, but.... nothing. /var had been formatted. There were no backups.

The my stomach and surrounding organs literally took a ride south. All my messages (I estimate 99% were from my mentor) since September, just... gone. Like that. In a flash of oversight.

It got me thinking. This event really impressed upon me a more complete realization of just how much of my life, my consciousness, my valued treasure resides inside this little box. So vulnerable. If losing 1.5 months' worth of email has me sick with loss, can I even truly imagine what I would feel if all my data were to be wiped. What if it had been not just a month or two, but my entire email archive? Or not just my email, but the web pages and content I've created? My image library. My mp3s. All the code that I've written over the years. My quotes database. Old papers. Theories. The list goes on.

What would I do? I don't know. Is that pathetic or marvelous? It is worth a thought.

Well, my X and my Mozilla appear to be running quite smoothly at the moment. My postgres was restored with minimal hassle. There's some packages I still haven't reinstalled yet, but aside from the loss of over a month of treasured words and moments, Argo seems to be better than ever. Haven't tried to do 3d again yet.

Wowee. Not the way I planned this day at all. Oh well. That's life. The bleeding edge. Sometimes it hurts, but those of us who choose it can barely imagine wanting to opt for anything else.

What have I learned from this experience? Always make backups. Really.

Oh, and every now and then, move those goddamn mail spool messages into a new file. procmail can always help with that. Silly me. Sheesh.

Well, I think I'll throw on a little music, and see about getting a few more of these pieces put into place before bed. Wierd. Very wierd.