Thursday, April 19, 2012

A night that stole more than just my sleep

What a night.. I lost all useful data on my desktop due to (a) lack of sleep (b) eagerness to install Fedora 17 Beta. How this happened is a long story, but here is the sequence of events

  1. I saw Fedora 17 Beta (got excited with the new release features)
  2. Got excited and upgraded my Fedora 15 (that I had maintained since Fedora 10 and kept doing upgrades) to Fedora 17
  3. Neither ATI proprietary nor the open source drivers work
  4. I decide to reinstall Fedora - Except that I used my home partition as root partition. I've lost all my scanned documents, my open source repositories (so many of them) :(. My programming, my SDK's, my projects, my articles, my documents, my downloads... I am going to cry. Moral of the story, backup is not for dummies, it is for everyone! Anyway, I am too arrogant to backup, even now :) Leave me alone!
  5. On the reinstalled partition, I am back to (c)
  6. Today, after extensive debugging I find out all my xorg.conf hacks don't work -- why? Apparently X has gotten smarter and needs additional options to enable specific monitor sections in xorg.conf to a specific output. By default all my configuration was being applied to my HDMI output.
  7. I figure it out, fix the display and now I am back to starting off from lot of empty space and this post.
  8. Thank god, I use some tools to keep my web data in sync and have backup of some key things (Oh! come on, everyone knows I was lying.. I do maintain backups on USB sticks once in a while, but not enough to stop complaining, yes I still lost all my data). Confused?

There you have it, thanks for reading my rant.. now back to work!

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