You didn’t even notice I was gone, I am sure, no biggie. The reason I have been gone was the fact Ubuntu on my laptop decided I mess it up to much and therefor went on strike 
. GDM wouldn’t start any more and the error message I got, two of the actually were unreadable.
When GDM would start up I got a nice big box with a stop sign and text that couldn’t be read as it each character was just little a little box, the font couldn’t be displayed.And when I clicked the button another box appeare, again with the stop sign and a bigger message in the same format. The log file showed GDM was unable to convert the UTF-8, it was also complaining about the locale settings. I installed KDM and was able to get into my Gnome desktop but certain programs were still complaining about the locale settings. After a couple of days of reinstalling certain packages I decided to try to upgrade to Hardy. This didn’t go so well I had to run the aptitude update for like 5 times and I still had to remove packages for the update to go smoothly. When the upgrade finally was completed Gnome still wouldn’t work as normal, I installed KDE4 and that worked “fine”, I mean it worked but man I really don’t like KDE4, it is slow. Starting Gnome made certain packages not run, as I created them myselfin Gutsy and I still had the Locale error messages when I tried to run certain programs.
I decided to wipe out my drive and start all over again with a clean install of Gutsy, my laptop was clean Feisty and upgraded to Gutsy configuration. Now I had to think of what things I needed to backup and it’s a lot. I have a second computer with enough space to hold that stuff. I starte dto write down which directories and configurations I had to backup. From the commandline I started archiving and copying over my stuff, Apache2 settings, hosts file, MySQL databases, my development directory, my documents directory, the gnupg directory, mail, etc etc. It’s a lot when you sit down and think about it.
The conclusion is I was able to reinstall my laptop, did my own partioning and restored what I archived. I did well, I made one mistake and forgot one directory, the mistake was I didn’t archive my archive my Tomboy notes, just the log file, arghhh and I forgot to backup my package creation directory. All the source packages I created for Getdeb and for myself are gone. For Getdeb it’s not a big deal I can download the lastes .diff.gz and start from there but the packages I created for myself will take more work, oh well.
Right now I’m back, I still have to reinstall certain packages and reconfigure setting as I also changed the layout of my own directories to make it easier to upgrade in the future but that’s ok. The good news is I still have all my developemnt work, the AVH plugins and other WordPress related development. It will probably take me a good week before I’m really back to where I want it to be, but for now it’s fine.
