Check out my new Android phone, the Atrix 2! This is my first smart phone, and I’m already in love with it. It comes with Gingerbread by default, but it”ll be getting the ICS update in Q3 of this year.
I upgraded to 64-bit Ubuntu 11.10 a few days ago
On Thursday, Ubuntu prompted me, asking if I wanted to upgrade from version 11.04 to 11.10. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have the latest version, so I clicked yes to the upgrade. It told me it was going to take 2 - 3 hours to upgrade, which I was fine with. In the middle of the upgrade, the screen turned black and a message told me that a file was corrupted. I started to panic, so I turned off my computer and turned it back on. Instead of booting up like normal, it brought me to a recovery mode screen. At first, I tried booting up my computer regularly, but that didn’t work. Then I tried booting it into safe mode, which brought me to a low-graphics version of Ubuntu, but I was never able to get past the logo screen. I started to panic even more because I had some unsaved files, including Java exercises and my Priceless Item stuff. I fiddled with the options for awhile, and tried booting up into previous Ubuntu versions, but nothing seemed to work.
On Friday, I asked my mom if she could help me recover some of my files before reinstalling Ubuntu. She took out my HDD and tried to hook it up to her Windows 7 computer, but Windows couldn’t read the HDD for some odd reason. We tried the same thing on my brother’s Mac, but it didn’t recognize the HDD, either. Then, I got a bright idea. I decided to download a fresh copy of Ubuntu 11.10 onto my 2GB SD card. Ubuntu has this neat feature where one can try out the OS before installing it onto the HDD. I plugged my SD card into my laptop and booted Ubuntu successfully. And what do you know? Ubuntu was able to read all of my files, so I backed up everything that I needed onto my 32GB SD card and then re-installed Ubuntu.
It recognized that I still had Ubuntu 11.04, and it asked me if I wanted to upgrade instead of deleting everything and starting over. To make a long story short, it froze before ever finishing the update. I finally said “screw it” to upgrading properly, deleted my partition, and installed Ubuntu 11.10 fresh.
I have no idea why Ubuntu acted the way that it did. I really hope I don’t have to do this every time I want to upgrade my OS.
I also want to mention something about Ubuntu 11.10 before I end this post. I like how they made the Software Manager more user-friendly and more-prone to being able to recognize .deb files.
One thing that I am not happy with is how they removed support for the official Sun Java 6 packages and you are now forced to use the OpenJDK packages instead. As a developer, I don’t appreciate this in the slightest. OpenJDK will always lag behind as well as not supporting all of the features of the official version. I looked up a tutorial, and I successfully installed the official version of Java 7. When I decided to open Eclipse, I got this vague error message about it not being able to recognize my JDK version. I got flustered and searched everywhere for a solution, but nothing worked. Not wanting to deal with it, I reluctantly re-installed OpenJDK 7 and then the Eclipse problem went away.
Lesson learned: always back up your stuff before upgrading to a new OS. Also, if the OpenJDK becomes a problem for me, I might have to look into different Linux distributions that support the official version.
