{"id":167,"date":"2018-04-04T08:05:43","date_gmt":"2018-04-04T08:05:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marcelhaas.com\/?p=167"},"modified":"2018-04-04T08:49:09","modified_gmt":"2018-04-04T08:49:09","slug":"why-upgrade-your-os-if-you-dont-need-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcelhaas.com\/index.php\/2018\/04\/04\/why-upgrade-your-os-if-you-dont-need-to\/","title":{"rendered":"Why upgrade your OS if you don’t need to?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two weeks ago I had nothing to do on a Saturday afternoon. Geeky as I am, I thought “let’s upgrade Xubuntu” on my laptop. I was still on the 16.04 Long Term Support version and it is 2018 by now, after all. A month or so later the new LTS version, 18.04, would appear, but why wait? That afternoon I had nothing better to do; when the new version comes out, I probably will be occupied. As usual, I googled around about a version upgrade from 16.04 to 17.10 and was, by every single site I encountered on the topic, strongly<\/em> advised not to try this. But alas, I’m as stubborn as data scientists get and went ahead anyway.<\/p>\n

Ouch. There seemed to be no problem at all. The upgrade was fine, except for some small weird looking error from LibreOffice, which I hardly ever use anyway. Everything worked as it worked before, even with the same looks (then why would you upgrade, right?). I played a game of Go<\/a> for a bit and then went and let all other software do their updates as well. The usual reboot went blazing fast. I was prompted for my password and then the shit hit the fan: black screen. Nothing. Light from under the keyboard, but that was the only sign of life.<\/p>\n

That is when you all of a sudden need a second computer. In all my confidence I had not created a bootable USB stick before the upgrade, and I didn’t have an older one with me either. With a terribly slow and annoying Windows laptop I managed to create one and booted the laptop from that. All fine. Good, so let’s replace the new and corrupted OS with something from this stick. Apparently, when I previously had installed my laptop, there seemed to be no need for a mount point for \/efi, and now there was. Annoyingly, this needed to be at the start of the partition table, screwing up pre-existing partitions on that disk. At that point I decided: alright, format the disk, decently partition the disk and a fresh install would make my dear laptop all young and fresh again. There are two SSDs in the machine, and there was a back up of my home on the second disk.<\/p>\n

The new install works like a charm, and restoring a back up also calls for some more cleaning up. It all looks tidy again.
\n\"\"<\/p>\n

I know, not everybody will be a fan of the old-school conky stuff on the desktop, but it just tickles my inner nerd a bit (and I actually do<\/em> use it to monitor the performance when something heavy is running, I sure like it better than a top screen!). Took a decent part of a day, altogether, so next time I might take the advise of fellow geeks a bit more seriously. On the other hand, after mounting the second disk and finding the backups intact, the short moment of relief is worth it.<\/p>\n

Off we go with a clean machine!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two weeks ago I had nothing to do on a Saturday afternoon. Geeky as I am, I thought “let’s upgrade Xubuntu” on my laptop. I was still on the 16.04 Long Term Support version and it is 2018 by now, after all. A month or so later the new LTS version, 18.04, would appear, but … Continue reading Why upgrade your OS if you don’t need to?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,16],"tags":[22,23,25,24],"class_list":["post-167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-posts","category-data-science","tag-linux","tag-ubuntu","tag-upgrade","tag-xubuntu"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcelhaas.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcelhaas.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcelhaas.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcelhaas.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcelhaas.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=167"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/marcelhaas.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":173,"href":"https:\/\/marcelhaas.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/167\/revisions\/173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcelhaas.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcelhaas.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcelhaas.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}