Today's entry is a break from the usual music news. As you're undoubtedly aware, media servers occasionally require a bit of maintenance and today was that day.
For days the Windows 10 free upgrade offer had been calling to me from the bottom of my screen. After nearly a week's hesitation I gave in and accepted the offer. Of course, this was a Microsoft upgrade, so it wasn't going to be a smooth ride. Three failed attempts and a non-responsive Windows Update later I found myself once again growing tired of Windows issues.
Curiously, my fiance was experiencing similar difficulties with her own machine - her latest Windows Update had run for an eternity with no response. Manual installation attempts were fruitless so we gave up and ran the full version installer.
The full version offered an opt-out for updates, but problems persisted when the installer failed to complete due to my multi-boot configuration.
Worse still an attempted removal of the secondary partition resulted in a corrupted MBR. I'd really had enough. Now the system was locked in an infinite booting loop with a dodgy partition. This called for drastic measures.
I raced to the nearest office supply store and snatched up a $9 novelty 8GB flash drive shaped like Superman. At the checkout, I asked if the store had a resident Linux guru and was directed to a scruffy fellow with a yeard (clearly qualifying him for the task). I asked if he knew whether a bootable USB Linux distro would be robust enough to repair a damaged MBR. He wisely responded, "well... it IS shaped like Superman."
And so I went to work. A quick bit of research produced a boot-repair-disk 64bit Linux distro and pendrivelinux.com's UUI software. I had previously left Linux behind in favor of a few Windows-based music management applications a few years ago, but this incident was a wake-up call that I needed to get back to Ubuntu.
After a successful system repair and a bit of research I successfully identified Linux alternatives for two dozen of my most-used applications and worked out the necessary Terminal commands for each of their respective installations.
The Guayadeque Audio Manager - a potential replacement for MediaMonkey Gold
And with that harrowing experience behind our intrepid hero, Innerspace Labs and our media server are now operating 100% in a Linux environment. It was long overdue, but it feels great to have made it to the other side.
Thank you, Superman.