Re: final gtk+maverick battles

[Chris Angelico <rosuav gmail com>]

On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 11:05 PM, Bric <bric flight us> wrote:
> FWIF:  with this drive to keep upgrading, I just lost a critical hour of
> sleep (I start new class material today and needed to be rested) because I
> messed up the one and only thing you should NEVER mess up in your system:
> network (wifi) connection (if you are out and about and have no way of
> plugging into ethernet):  With my eye on the 14.04 prize, I checked
> "unsupported" and "pre-release" packages in Update Manager, so it went ahead
> and installed newer linux-firmware, which screwed up my wifi connection.
> Luckily, I was still near an ethernet port, and downgraded.  Again, just a
> caveat/caution for anyone who might try to draw from this experience.

Hey, it's a lot easier than back when I first started playing with
networking, in the 1990s. Granted, it was normal then to install off a
CD, but on the flip side, it was normal to need to get specific
drivers for your actual card. We got to know a few reliable cards
(Realtek network cards, ET6000 video cards, and such) that would
always work with our beloved OS/2, and if anything went wrong, I'd go
to my stash and grab one. Otherwise, it was a matter of transfer by
floppy disk, or pulling out the LinkWiz cable and moving data through
the computers' parallel ports. (Or their serial ports, if we didn't
feel like unplugging the ol' noisy. So much slower that way, even
though LinkWiz would (ab)use quite a few of the pins for extra data.)

These days, the face-palm DOH! moment usually comes from ssh'ing to a
box and then ifconfigging the network interface down. Yeah, that one
gets annoying.

ChrisA