Last night at approximately 11:30pm, I decided to update my Lucid Lynx Ubuntu installation to a beta of Maverick Meerkat. Did I lose you there? A while back I followed some instructions for getting my MacBook to dual boot using rEFIt, which was pretty easy. It grabbed some of the unused space on my internal hard drive and repartitioned the drive so I could also install Ubuntu. It works like a charm. You get a cool boot screen that lets you pick between Mac OS and Ubuntu (or whatever other OS you want to play around with). I’ve tried Parallels, VirtualBox and VMware and there’s just nothing like dual booting. As a geek, I just wanted to give it a try and play around. I do have to say, Ubuntu really rocks. I could probably use it full-time and I’ve considered it. I ended up using it for a week straight and the only thing I couldn’t get it to do was recognize my second monitor at work. For those who don’t like tinkering, Ubuntu is somewhat of a nightmare. It also really makes you appreciate OS X when you come back to it.
If you’re interested in giving it a try, I would start with the Ubuntu Community Documentation. There’s a whole section on switching from Mac, which frankly no one in their right mind would do, at least not completely. As soon as you work your way through that, you’ll want to immediately check out OMG Ubuntu’s amazing list of 10 things to do after installing Ubuntu 10.04. You’ll also want to add that blog to your Google Reader. It’s one of the best Ubuntu-focused blogs out there. You may also want to take a look at my Ubuntu bookmarks.
So back to last night… I burned a CD of the latest Meerkat installer, booted up my MacBook from the CD and went ahead with the installation. The problem was that because I was booting from the CD, I wasn’t just dealing with the Ubuntu partition, but my entire internal drive, which of course I didn’t realize until the installation was done and it booted right into Ubuntu. Face palm. Of course I knew better. I felt so incredibly stupid, but that’s what I get for messing around late at night when I’m not paying attention.
The good news is that it forced me to do one of my annual clean installs of OS X and I also moved every document on my hard drive to Dropbox and my Dreamhost remote server backup. My computer is running faster than I ever remember, which is nice. I lost some photos and music that I hadn’t backed up over the last few weeks, which I was pretty upset about. I pay for Mozy and ended up uninstalling it because every time it got to my iPhoto library, the fans on my MacBook sounded like a jet engine and became totally unusable. Guess it’s time to give it another try, but not before I install Ubuntu again.
When was your last face-palm nerd moment?