The new incarnation of Trouble looms menacingly close to completion. The grief I had with Ubuntu and AHCI was fixed by one B. Meyer who pointed out to me that most modern AHCI implementations are incomplete leading me to try turning AHCI off, and further to update my bios. All is now well, and I am once more very impressed with Ubuntu, both as a server platform and as a desktop OS.

Today I tried to take a copy of /home off the old server. I say “tried” because shortly after I plugged the USB sneakernet drive into Trouble 1.0, it crashed and refused to come back up, or indeed to do much of anything, including power up its graphics card or make startup beeps. Not Good. Further examination revealed that it had cooked either motherboard or CPU for no particular reason. This was solved with a new CPU and motherboard and CPU and three hours cursing, swearing, sweating and furiously wielding a screwdriver. It is now up and running, in that same very precarious, temporary sense in which a card-tower is ‘up’. It is hopefully making me a nice big tarball of the entirety of /home too…

Since I have the magnificent power of comments once again, I am also doing a bit of a casting-call: I need a new wiki, a new web-logging tool, and a new gallery app for the new Trouble. Does anyone care to make any recommendations? Please explain why your idea is better.

Thank you!