A Penguin in the Orchard

Tough Saturday

My Satudays are usually pretty full with putting together The Roadhouse. I can just figure on 8-10 hours, even if I’ve managed to pull all the music together late Friday night. I didn’t even do that this week, as I was wiped from a tough week from work. But, I was up around 7:30 yesterday morning, hoping to get the show done by 6:00 pm.

After getting all the musical segments together, the voiceovers recorded and everything normalized and saved as .wav files, I heard a noise you never want to hear. Even with my enclosed headphones on, I could hear a sound coming from the desktop machine: ti-clink, ti-clunk, ti-clunk. I noticed that the drive light was solid red and that the machine was running horribly slow. The box did manage to save all the critical show files but then locked completely. I shut it down and restarted, only to find that it couldn’t detect the primary 40 GB hard drive containing the Ubuntu OS. Well, this isn’t good …

The upside is that all my media files are stored on another 200 GB drive in the machine. Those files are normally shared with the laptop via NFS. However, with the OS drive down, I obviously couldn’t even get to them from the laptop. So, off to Best Buy for another drive.

I ended up with a Western Digital Caviar 160 GB drive for $80. The drive swap went flawlessly, as did the Ubuntu install. Within a few hours, I was back up and running. I managed to get all the pieces of the show edited together and converted to mp3. Finally, around 11:30 pm, I got the show posted. That preserved my 69-week streak of Saturday show postings, but barely.

I was actually pretty surprised by the Ubuntu install. I grabbed the torrent while swapping the drives, burned it to disc on the laptop and was quickly ready to re-install. Having converted from Badger to Dapper via apt-get, I didn’t realize that the Dapper CD is both a live CD and an install CD. I was a little confused to see a full desktop come up without any effort. The “Install” icon on the desktop should have been some indication, but, like I said, I was bit confused. Once I figured it out, the install was, without question, the easiest Linux install I’ve ever done.

So, what’s normally an 8-10 hour process was a 16-hour gig. That’s cool, though, because I’m now sitting on 400 GB of storage on the primary Linux box (160 + an existing old 40 + the 200 media drive). I should have plenty of storage — though I’ve said that before …

[tags]Linux, Ubuntu, The Roadhouse[/tags]