Day: August 24, 2020

I’ve been feeling a bit out of sorts, lately – hard to pinpoint why.
So I decided to plunge myself into computer issues. Perhaps there’s something of my uncle in me, right? I started trying to build a “development box” using my old laptop that brought with me from Korea. It’s not (and never was) a very good computer. But I’m not looking for performance, here – just a separate machine where I can try to run things without messing up my main computer (which is the HP “Lemon” I bought in 2018 – a laptop, too, but with a useless battery and some other issues, but which I have repurposed as a desktop Linux computer and works fine as that).
The Korean laptop is a 2009 “XNote” – whatever brand that is. It had been running “Windows 7 Korean”, which was a hassle because Microsoft doesn’t let you simply change languages in an operating system: you have to pay them first, as if you were buying a new operating system. This is true despite the fact that the data to support such a change is already inside the computer. So for all those years, I had to cope with error messages and applications running in Korean. I suppose it was a good way to learn some Korean, but it was stressful when you have to get something done and you get an error message and you have to break out the dictionary to figure out what’s wrong.
Anyway, I had set up linux (ubuntu 18.04) a few months ago, deleting the Korean Windows altogether. So now I ambitiously set out to replicate on this little laptop the same configuration I run on my server (the one that lives in a California “server farm” where this blog and all my mapping websites live). This is possible, as long as one isn’t concerned about speed and performance issues.
But I messed something up. I was trying to install Ruby – a programming language environment used for some of the mapping website software – and got stuck on a permissions problem. These are very common in linux, which has a pretty arcane and strict system of file permissions. In trying to repair that problem, I broke the operating system – certain files require certain permissions, or the whole apparatus comes tumbling down. I lost the ability to run root-level commands (called “sudo” in ubuntu) and furthermore, on reboot, the system hung before fully loading. End of operating system.
Microsoft’s Windows was famous for many, many years for presenting a “Blue Screen of Death” when it crashed. This was called the BSOD, and was more common than anyone liked. Well Ubuntu linux has its own BSOD, except it’s more a dark purple rather than blue. And it’s even less informative than Microsoft’s version.
So I had to start over. Tomorrow I go to work. I might not now make progress on this project until Thursday or Friday.