new laptop with ubuntu 14.04

As I was getting worried about the chances of survival of my current laptop (bought in emergency upon my return from Kyoto!), I decided to use some available grant money to buy a new laptop without stepping through the emergency square. Thanks to my local computer engineer, Thomas, I found a local dealer selling light laptops with an already installed Ubuntu 14.04… And qwerty (UK) keyboards. Even though the previous move to Kubuntu 12.04 had been seamless, a failed attempt to switch a Mac to Ubuntu a few months later left me wary about buying a computer first and testing later whether or not it was truly Linux compatible. I am therefore quite happy with the switch and grateful to Thomas for the suggestion. I managed to re-compile my current papers and to run my current R codes, plus connect by wireless and read photos from my camera, hence validating the basic operations I primarily require from a computer! And reinstalled KDE. (I am still having difficulties with the size of the fonts in Firefox though. Which do not seem coherent from a tab to the next.) Enough to sacrifice a new sticker to cover the brand on its cover….

en route to Australia

Despite the very long flights and the two transfers in Singapore and Brisbane, I found the trip to Australia only moderately tiring! Maybe because I managed to sleep for close to 8 hours on the first leg. Maybe because of the (great) facility of my new and cheap Compaq to keep running for a whole leg of seven hours without exhausting the battery (that I reloaded in Singapore). Maybe because I am finally getting used to twelve hour flights after my round trip to Kyoto last week. Maybe because having five breakfasts (my favourite meal!) in two days is a good enough reward. I even watched a movie, The Hunger Games, in two parts: one half before landing in Singapore and the other half over Bali. It is a terrible movie, with poor acting and even worse scenario. Plus, it has a rather lame ending, since the structure of the Orwellian society where those games take place is not at all perturbed by the actions of the characters since they were manipulated till the very end. However. the lame plot had some interesting game theory implications: in a game where all adversaries have to be eliminated, does it make sense to make temporary alliances? And then I suddenly remembered having read a blog about this, a few months ago!

The only painful part of the trip actually was to travel with two laptops, as I am not trusting the Compaq to stand the whole visit to Australia, nor the newly installed Macbook to be sufficiently stable. (I even took an external hard-drive to make daily security backups and to keep both laptops attuned…) I also wish my daughter had not “borrowed” my Canon point-and-shoot camera as there were particularly nice views when we landed both in Singapore and in Brisbane. Travelling with my (wife’s) Nikon J1 is not exactly as easy (more about this later!). And I do not think I can take it running, although I will obviously give it a try.

I now hope it won’t take me too long to get on Australian time(s) and look very much forward the interactions being an AMSI Lecturer can induce!

precise pangolin (Ubuntu 12.04)

Following the crash of my hard drive right before leaving Kyoto, I bought a cheap Compaq Presario CQ57 to reinstall Ubuntu 12.04 over the weekend (and have a laptop available before leaving for Australia…)  It took about one hour to install from the DVD and everything seems to be working out of the box. The only part where I wasted time was the partition as I kept the original Windows 7 as dual boot, in case I recover my Macbook Pro early enough (and can get rid of this as a safety backup)… I had to remove one of the four partitions found on the computer to create unallocated space for the three Linux partitions (swat, / and /home, which took a while sine I had to do it under Windows 7 (which went for ever to update revisions I was not the slightest interested in…)

I wrote the above yesterday night and, this morning, Gilles Barés, computer wizz (and fantastic photographer!) manages to recover the contents of my hard-drive by reading it on another Macbook with Ubuntu on it… As it happens, there was nothing wrong with the hard-drive in the end, “simply” the motherboard was doing funny things..! I thus have now a new operational Macbook Pro with Ubuntu 12.04! Plus this backup Compaq I may leave at home for emergencies…

A further update a day later (07/04)is that AppleCare eventually accepted to handle my Macbook (after forcing me to reinstall an Apple OS on the disk!) and found that the issue was the cable connecting the motherboard to the hard-drive. This is repaired and I thus hope to take my old laptop with me to Australia in three days!

Mechanical mishaps [coincidences]

Following my computer incidents of the past two weeks, one of my colleagues in Paris-Dauphine, Olivier, got exactly the same sequence of troubles: the day I got my Macbook Air back, the hinges of his broke, then as he was getting ready to get it back, the videocard of his Macbook Pro died. An interesting row of coincidences, even though we bought both of our two computers at about the same time (as my son, unimpressed, pointed out).

A new series of mishaps

Following the slight difficulties of last week, I had a hard week on the computer front: indeed, on Monday, I received my 2007 macbook from the repair shop, with a new video card, courtesy of Apple. Unfortunately, this started a series of problems. First, the old macbook stopped recognizing the NVIDIA video and, while it worked under VESA, the system got unstable to the point that I had no choice but to install Maverick Meerkat (Ubuntu 10.10) to make it work again… This proved rather unsuccessful in that the new installment is periodically login me out, especially when I am under Firefox or Acrobat… (Most items are working, though, including the bluetooth Apple mouse… Anyway, Pierre kindly offered to take a look over the weekend.) This was not the end of my worries, though, as I stupidly typed sudo chown xian on my new macbook while on / (when I thought I was on /home/xian). This was very very s.t.u.p.i.d. (I committed this major error during Pierre’s talk two days ago, while typing my post on SMC²!) and it also ruined the whole system, despite a manual attempt at recreating the ownership of the system directories… This also ended in a reinstallation of Maverick Meerkat from the start, which surprisingly did not produce the same outcome as the first time, with hardly anything working. Even under the minimal Ubuntu configuration. So this morning I once again started from scratch, using the whole disk and letting the installation CD make all the decisions. Except for the sound (!), everything seems to be working now. Including the webcam as shown above. (Once I installed Isight.) Then tonight, the hinge of the macbook Air I keep at home (and often borrowed by my daughter) broke, a frequent problem with macbook air‘s as I brought one from the department to the repair shop on Monday in exchange for my repaired macbook… And to make the day complete, this morning a neighbouring car kindly pointed out to me a flat tire on my car! I am glad I recovered my bike with a new axis earlier this week…