Explaining My Absence

Well, you could certainly say I “pulled a ZZach” again, although I would say that isn’t entirely fair, as it was not fully my fault this time. Sadly, before I could make a backup which contained the new site, my computer decided to stop charging. So, logically, I figure that I’ll just get a new charge (they’re like $20 for the laptop in question). So a couple of days later it comes in, and my laptop charges once, before it quickly dies again. Frustrated, I begin to do some research. Well, it turns out, as far back as the HP Elitebook 850 G2, the firmware in the laptops requires an official HP charger, or the device won’t charge.

Understandably frustrated, but finally having enough money, I buy another laptop (a tried and true ThinkPad this time), but there’s just one issue: a great deal of my personal data, including the data for this site, was stored on a PCIe drive on the old laptop, and this new one only takes SATA and mSATA. So I had no way of pulling the data off of that particular drive, unless I could get the old laptop to charge, which had already proven to be very frustrating.

Which leads to a few days ago, when I found another HP charger that I didn’t know I had, hidden away in my closet, which was able to charge the old laptop. I had already promised to give it to my sister if she could get a charger for it, so before I gave it to her I pulled all of the data off of the drive onto my 2TB backup hard drive, before wiping the OS and installing Linux Mint for her.

Which brings us to a couple of days ago, when wifi suddenly stopped working on my device, after I copied the data over, but before I could write a post. So I decided to reinstall; and since this laptop can run with nearly fully libre drivers, I decided to try out Hyperbola. Hyperbola is fine, but it was lacking certain libre software I use a lot; including Hugo, which I use to generate this site. So I wiped everything and reinstalled Artix (again). Only, while I was setting up Artix, I accidentally turned the whole 500G mSATA drive I had my home partition on into an encrypted SWAP partition (I added the ‘swap’ flag to the wrong drive in the crypttab). So I had to reformat the drive, and copy over all of my data again. Which was this morning/afternoon, because it takes a bloody long time to copy 100G from a hard drive over USB2. So here I am now, with a fully functional Artix install, writing a post to give you an update.

It’s a shame that Hyperbola didn’t work out. It was really weird, though, like a GNU FSD version of Debian, but with the Arch package management, and a lot of kind-of supported AUR packages; if you could get them to download, they would probably compile from source, but you would have to mess around with the dependencies.

It looks like, once again, my beloved Artix is here to stay (and save the day again).