The most costly phrase

You know what the most costly phrase you can say is? "While you're in there..."

Not my computer

I've said it while I was discussing work to be done on my car. Suddenly a job that should have cost a couple hundred dollars now costs a couple thousand. I went in to get the oil changed and the tires rotated and I said, "while you're in there... the air conditioning seems weak." It turns out that replacing the A/C compressor on my car costs a bit over $2k. But it's about to be summer, and it gets hot and humid here.

The same applies with computers. My primary desktop computer crashed a few days ago. The first attempt to reboot hung. The second got as far as the boot menu before powering itself down. The third reboot wouldn't even bring up the BIOS.

I stripped the machine down to mobo, CPU, one stick of RAM, and a simple video card. It still wouldn't boot to the BIOS. I tried replacing the CMOS battery and clearing the BIOS settings. Still nothing. On a whim I pulled the remaining uber-fast 8GB RAM stick and replaced it with one of the slower 4GB sticks I'd installed when I built this machine about 10 years ago. THAT would boot to the BIOS. Okay, so I have a RAM problem of some sort.

I'll leave out the details, but it appears that two of the four 8GB DIMMs no longer work. I reinstalled the two that worked and got the system to pass 8 hours of Memtest86+ tests. I reconnected the rest of the peripherals and tried to boot the OS. That came up part way, reported a failure to read the initrd, dropped to the maintenance prompt, and a moment later powered itself off. Oh boy.

I used to use this machine to do my job as a professional software engineering consultant. All the data partitions are mirrored (RAID 1). One of my first consulting jobs was for a company that made RAID controllers, and they referred to RAID as "a way to destroy huge amounts of data extremely fast." Heeding their experience, anything not trivially replaceable is backed up to a server nightly, which itself has a RAID 5 array. And that is backed up to an off-site server a few hours later. So I wasn't too worried about losing my work. But I needed to get the machine booting cleanly.

I had been running Kubuntu 22.04 LTS. Officially this will be supported until April 2027, but I've already started finding the latest versions of some of the applications I use won't run on 22.04. So I figured that while I'm in there I might as well install Kubuntu 24.04 LTS. I got that running, but I detest Canonical's snap distribution system, and that's the only way they distribute both Firefox and Thunderbird. So down that merry rabbit hole I went, downloading and installing these from Mozilla. Followed by hours of installing and configuring other applications I use.

After two days I had a stable, usable system again. You know what won't run now? Xilinx ISE, due to yet another incompatible shared library problem. I'm pretty sure I can fix this, which will lead to yet another post in the series on how to run this obsolete program on a current OS. I should probably consolidate them all in one big post.

One of the fine folk who reads this blog commented that he'd gotten so annoyed at this that he created a Docker container to run ISE in. I spent another day exploring that rabbit hole. I can see how that's an easy solution if you are already familiar with Docker, but running a GUI app in a container looks like a pain. I think ISE would be better as an Appimage than a Docker container, but I'll need a VM running Ubuntu 16.04 to create one.

Did you know Broadcom recently bought VMware? There are pluses and minuses to that, but while I'm in there maybe I should move my VMs to KVM? That's taken yet another day to research, and will probably take another day to get working well. Or as well as might be expected, with the host missing half its memory.

Why am I taking the time to update this blog when I could be finishing this upgrade? A replacement pair of DIMMs arrived this afternoon. While I write this on my laptop, my desktop is back to running Memtest86+ to see if the new pair will play well with the old pair.