I’m not sure what happened last night, but when I got up this morning, my development system was showing the log-in screen. I leave it running overnight, so that it can do it’s daily backups, so the screen should have been in low-power mode, and once awakened it should have been on the system-locked screen, prompting me for just my password before letting me into the session that I had running last night. Furthermore, the log-in prompt had a bunch of garbage characters already entered into it. That and a few white cat-hairs suggest that whatever the problem was, it was caused by one of our feline “children,” who has taken to sleeping on the desk next to the heat exhaust on this system — a practice we’ll have to discourage now, I think.

When I logged in and tried to start up the Eclipse framework (which, as mentioned previously on this blog, I use for all of my software development under Linux), I was told that it couldn’t start. After a lot of trial and error, I managed to get it up and running, but I’d lost the Cusp extension that I use for Lisp development, and nothing I did would bring it back.

I’ve got backups of all my data, but I didn’t see a need (or have the space) to back up the OS files too, so I couldn’t get it back that way. I’d wanted to install the new version of Ubuntu anyway, and I wasn’t comfortable just directly upgrading (I’ve probably screwed things up on this install, with all my experimentation and customization), so this seemed like as good a time as any to do a complete reinstall. I’d already downloaded the CD image, so I burned it to a CD and began.

A few hours, two reinstalls, and one major headache later, I finally got the display back to the proper resolution. It seems that the highly-touted new “Screens and Graphics” system has a few bugs in it… when I tried to enable my second monitor, it screwed everything up. It enabled it okay, and the virtual screen size seemed to be correct — but the resolution on both screens was either 800 by 600 or less, and moving the mouse to the edge of the physical screen scrolled the view along the virtual screen. I couldn’t stand that, so after wrestling with it for a while, I gave up on it. I’m running on only one monitor at the moment; I’ll look into getting the second one running again later, when I have the time.

Other than that problem, everything went fairly smoothly. The new BlueTooth manager is nice, though not terribly intuitive — I had to search the ‘net to figure out how to get my BlueTooth keyboard and mouse to connect using it. I’m still installing applications, but I don’t expect any trouble… and if I run into any, you can be sure I’ll write about it on this blog. 🙂