Eric Richardson lives in Los Angeles, California, and is generally interested in the intersection between technology, community and news.

After founding hyperlocal news site blogdowntown and working in public radio, today he works on pattern-based analytics applications for Emcien.

Never Quite as Planned

Posted Wednesday, March 15, 2006, at 10:35PM by Eric Richardson

The replacement drive for my laptop came in today. I installed Windows from my restore cd, used a Knoppix cd to run qtparted and free up some space and then went to install Linux via a Debian net-install cd I had lying handy (current as of a month or two ago).

The Debian install got through the cd part, but then things turned a little ugly when it came to installing packages. locale and base-config (I think... something like that) conflicted, and it wouldn't move forward. I flipped over to a terminal and tried to resolve the conflict manually, but only succeeded in making the setup process start respawning.

Handily, by this stage there's a pretty full-featured base Debian installed. I probably could have hand massaged package installation, but instead I used apt-get to install cdrecord, grabbed a new netinstall via wget and burned myself a new cd. That one's now happily installing.

There was a day when I used to think that sort of thing was fun. I think that day may have passed.


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