Small disaster happened

First off, a happy and prosperous new year for the people reading this blog!

The day before Christmas, I was working again (of course) on my domotics system. While doing an update of my Kubuntu 6.10 virtual machine, I was told I could upgrade to Kubuntu 7.10.

Since I'm always quite eager to do this (being up-to-date with my applications/OS), I took the risk to start the upgrade.

All went fine, until the moment I lost my internet connection on my virtual machine. Shortly after, I got the message that the system could not download any more the remaining parts of the upgrade.

And there I stood... A system which was half-half upgraded but that could not access the internet any more. Even worse, my samba connection was gone too, so I could not even reach my virtual machine from my Windows environment any more. Sad, sad, sad...

I've been looking on the internet, asked for some advice, but nobody that could help me get my internet connection back on my virtual machine.

Luckily, I'm taking a weekly backup of the software I've written for my domotics system, so I was quite confident I was not going to loose the most important thing.

In the end, the only thing I could do was buying a new harddisk and install Kubuntu 7.10 from scratch. I definitely didn't want to re-install what I still had, because one day or another there might be things I need on my new installation that are still only available on my, well, call it from now onwards "back-up".

The biggest problem now will be to have the state of the new virtual machine equal to the state of the old one.

Since I installed quite a bit of apps (going from FoxBoard stuff to debugging tools to editing tools to Kubuntu tools), it will take me still a lot of time to get on the same level again. This has been 14 days now, so I lost quite a bit of time.

In the mean time, I've re-installed the FoxBoard SDK on the new distro and bit by bit I will try to get to the level I had on my old distro.

Conclusion: be very careful with upgrades. If I want to do an upgrade in the (near) future, I will definitely start from scratch and as long as the new situation has not reached the level of the old situation, I won't change anything any more to the stable environment.

I've learned my lessons, I would say. So, be warned... ;-)