Brilliant. My PC crashed again. GRUB stops working and there’s no way to access anything. Or is there?

Something’s wrong with my hard disk. I’m not very sure what exactly. But that’s besides the point – I want it working again. Soon. Please.

BeatrIX to the rescue. Yes, I have MEPIS and the Ubuntu LiveCD with me as well – which I’ll use for the actual recovery work – but when it comes to a speedy bootup with a no-frills approach to getting back to work, I prefer the small and simple BeatrIX.

Some meddling around with the command line and I’ve gotten root access and the access to all my data. Phew. It’s all there. Maybe I’ll get it backed up at office and format the HDD.

Wednesday night:
Everything’s back to normal. Or, as normal as a fresh installation of my operating system can be.

Due to its simplicity and elegance, not to mention the fact that it kept me online during a Hard-disk-less time, my copy of BeatrIX gets its place amongst my most favourite CDs.

So it goes that people with a lot of knowledge on a subject are powerful, whereas those with a little knowledge on a subject are walking time bombs.

Guess which category I belong to?

I started off with computers at the British Council, playing around on a BBC Micro and playing Sherlock Holmes on what was an IBM PC.

I later would have my own BBC Micro, being totally awestruck at the incredible 32 Kilobytes of RAM and running at a staggering 2MHz.

The things it could do with those resources?
Elite. ’nuff said.

I’ve assembled most of the PCs that I’ve owned since then, been responsible for a lot crashes, but also a wealth of knowledge (or so I tell myself).

So surely my decision to move to a more Business-oriented education and career path couldn’t have diminished my geek-factor? I stay in touch with what’s going on – I read ZDNet.

Ah, I am mistaken.

Fiddling around with things, where possible taking them apart to see how they work, has been something ingrained into my very being. So when I install Ubuntu, have everything running smoothly, trust me to go dabble.

Dabble, I do. As a result, gnome-panel goes berserk and I’m now running a fresh install of Ubuntu. The people at #Ubuntu on freenode have also come across the problem, but I wasn’t able to glean enough to be able to fix things.

This has been a truly humbling experience. I shall now go off to sleep while Synaptic updates everything.

There is a book in my future. Very possibly it’s called “Linux for Dummies”.