tavaiah is dead

The disk containing / and /home/ died, and with it the system which was my main system for many years. Hardware, disks, and distributions changed, but I used the same /home/ since about Debian 2.1 slink, apparently about 1999. The disk completely died without any prior warning - that's the first time such thing happened to me, previously "disk failure" meant just a few bad sectors and loss of a couple of files. I lost many years worth of personal stuff (I didn't backup it, so only stuff on GMail survived) and quite a bit of software.

The new system is a fresh kUbuntu 7.04. It is basically usable now. I managed to restore a lot of software using a few weeks old snapshot of the SVN repository and stuff on taw.chaosforge.org.

By the way it's simply unbelievable how much the default Firefox sucks. It creates popup windows instead of opening new tabs (and there's no obvious way to fix it), and doesn't save state when exiting. Opera was better 8 years ago than default Firefox is now.

To fix session loss bug install Session Manager addon. To fix the popups bug go to about:config and change:

• browser.link.open_newwindow from 2 to 3
• browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction from 2 to 0

Or remove Firefox and install Opera.

Another thing that really sucks - rubygems totally ignores packages installed by apt. It won't even work with --ignore-dependencies. It might have been the simplest thing that could possibly work, but it's high time for them to cooperate at least a little bit.