solution

when selected it Windows claimed there was an error on the drive, but all this caused was to reboot several times, and roll back the changes

back in Ubuntu I checked dmesg

all this showed was a known AMD graphics card error, nowt to worry about,
or show what the hard drive issue was

next step was to check fstab to see if the partition was listed

had to force my way in: sudo nano /etc/fstab

here was my first clue, there were no deets listed for the partition in question

from the terminal I ran sudo blkid to find the relevant UUID

back in fstab I made the addition:#Entry for /dev/sd## :
UUID="HEX_CODE" /media/sd## ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_NZ.UTF-8 0 0

still no success, still not writable 🙁

refusing to give up, it was the wrong side of midnight, I pulled out the big guns with sudu su, and ran sudo chown -R 777 /media/sd##

returned by to the normal user to find all rights had been restored 🙂 …
although I haven’t booted Windows 10 as yet to see if there are any implications, but even if they are, I now know how to fix it 🙂

story

No posts lately as I heard that the Thargoids have arrived in Elite:Dangerous last Friday 🙂

How has this caused my hiatus? 

I rushed out and picked up a new graphics card (Radeon RX 480) and a 256 Gig Samsung SSD so I could play the game with ease. 

That’s when the trouble began!  I found I couldn’t migrate Win7 easily off a partition on a 2TB HD to the SSD; or rather I could, but Windows wouldn’t open. 

I also had issues installing the Radeon drivers on Debian.  I tried and failed to rebuild a kernel (first attempt), and I didn’t know there were new Linux kernels available, still not sure if they would work. 

So I re-installed Ubuntu, as I knew there were Radeon drivers available.  So after installing Ubuntu on my original SSD I found after many attempts that I couldn’t install Win 7 on my new SSD… but I could install Ubuntu on it, and Win7 was happy to install on my original SSD. 

Best part of 3 days it took me to remove my old graphics card, slot in the new one, plug the new SSD into a SATA port on the motherboard, install 2 new operating systems, and setup Steam and Elite:Dangerous, including the Horizons DLC! 

Thank the Linux gods that I have a weekly backup of my Home directory that’s easy to bring back with Deja Dup. 

For the rest of the 2 weeks I’ve been flying around space 🙂

I didn’t jump straight back into my Clipper; after accidents when coming back to E:D after a break in the past.  So I mapped my keys to a wired xbox controller (I still find the ergonomics suit my large hands better than the PS4 pads) and took my Vulture out for a ride. 

I didn’t take many risks, practiced takeoff’s and docking, all was going well, so thought I’d try comabat. 

Now I remember this ship could hold its own so I was quite confident approaching a Conflict Zone, even after time away. 

I was destroyed within 5 mins, WTF!  It felt like the ship had been nerfed, or it could have been my new lack of skills. 

So I cashed in the insurance and bought one of my favourite ships in the game, an Asp.  I moved over what hardware I could, and sold the rest. 

For the next few days I flew my Asp around Imperial space, running data, fetch, and delivery missions, not wasting weight on weapons.  I didn’t realise immediately that I had purchased an Asp Scout, and not the model I’d had fun exploring and trading with in the past, the Asp Explorer… or am I just confused and was there only the Asp available on launch?  Shit it was over 2 years ago! 

Anyway I was then confident enough to have my Clipper delivered to me and things have been going well, except for one failed planetary landing that cost me another insurance claim. 

The game seems to have improved in many little ways, and now it’s easier on the eyes with my new graphics card, and stutter free. 

I’ve even done something that I once though pedestrian, and have installed a docking computer on the Clipper, loving the sylish landings and how Frontier have kept the classical music that kicks in with the computer as on the original. 

So I’m cruising around Harm with some nice one jump return 3.2k/tonne loops, working on saving credits to afford maybe a Python next so I’m not limited to large landing pads. 

Loving picking Elite up again, and I haven’t set out yet to find the Engineers, Alien Ruins, or the Thargoids 🙂

Yesterday I did something that I’ve been considering for a while; I burned my installation of Ubuntu and installed Debian. 

I’ve been a long time fan of Ubuntu, since before the Unity days, I stuck with the Canonical distro through the Amazon debacle, and the community as been awesome and supportive over the years, and I have loyalty to them. 

Although yesterday the KDE plasma installation started having issues, as ever with Ubuntu I find it easier to create a fresh install of the OS rather than try and fix the issues when I’ve installed a broad selection of drivers and programs and I’m not sure which ones have gone tits up. 

I was tempted to try the latest Fedora 25, that I’ve been playing with in VirtualBox, but I’m a little too attached to apt-get 🙂

The Debian experience

installation has been a straightforward

biggest pain was having to install the Debian non-free firmware… or more identifying that I needed to install the Debian non-free firmware 🙂

I installed synaptic and deja-dup to access my backed up home directory, which also gave me my .bashrc file back with aliases

now have all my usual programs installed, and everything is running as quickly as ever

I love the option when installing to add different desktop environments, I’ve been playing with Gnome 2, Gnome 3, KDE, Xfce, Mate, but settled for now on Cinnamon

Status

installed KDE desktop, not sure why I haven’t tried it before, although I did try Mate a few weeks ago that I can’t get to work correctly

excited about season 2 of Street Fighter V I’ve reinstalled it on the PS4, and I’m more frustrated and annoyed by Capcom’s servers than ever

repetatively the server connection keeps dropping, the only solution I can find is to close the game and re-load

the novelty of getting to practice with Akuma wore off quite quickly, I couldn’t even find a single game 🙁

I’m excited about Elite: Dangerous coming the the PS4 this year, although not sure I can be motivated to put the hours in again, and I don’t think Commanders will be able to migrate over saved profiles

currently downloading the one game I’ve purchased on Steam Kerbal Space Program yet again. 

I’ve just searched and found that it’s already available for the PS4… not sure how I missed this! 

There were a couple of games I’d seen before; a teacher booting up a 5 1/4 inch disk of Elite being the most memorable [this is how long ago it was, none decimal measurements in fractions], on a BBC Micro
However the first game I had the privilege of playing, and becoming a trial, was Thrust

Thrust is a 1986 computer game released on most home computers.  The perspective is two dimensional platform-based and the player’s aim is to manoeuvre a spaceship by rotating and thrusting, as it flies over a landscape and through caverns.  Gameplay of Thrust was heavily inspired by Atari’s Gravitar. 

So how stoked am I to find Super Transbal 2 on the Ubuntu software library, free of charge 🙂

“Super Transbal 2” is the sequel of “Transball” and “Transball 2”, Inspired in THRUST type of games (and concretely in ZARA THRUSTA for the Amiga 500).  In each level of Transball, the goal is to find the SPHERE, capture it and carry it to the upper part of the level.  The main obstacle is the gravity, that impulses you towards the ground.  But many other obstacles, canons, tanks, doors, etc.  will try to make difficult your journey…

This so takes me back to my childhood lunch breaks, and is an amazing reproduction of what I remember as the original. 

The download is tiny… although detrimentally so is the game play window, but everything else, including the tough challenge is as awesome as the original

I’ve not been posting as often as I’d like due to the Android WordPress app not connecting… that’s another post. 

What I have been doing over the last couple of days is dropping any stories that I like to Google Keep.  This has to be the one mobile app that I find the most useful; from shopping, book, movie, games, and to-do lists, to inspirations, notes, and shit I must blog otherwise I’ll never think of the topic again 🙂

Trials of a 21st century digital life eh? 

Google Keep is choice, but how do I access it from Ubuntu, I don’t even use Chrome? 

Searching through F-Droid for yubico I came across a link to KeyPassDroid; I’d come across a password safe solution on the yubico site using KeyPass, but was shied away as it mentioned the premium version… I don’t mind paying for shit, although if I can solve the issue with free open source alternatives I’ll spend hours trying 🙂

So the solution that I’ve pulled together:

created a KeyPassX database on my Ubuntu machine with all login email details