LinLog

Hey, I found another Edgy bug! This one only happened on the laptop. I didn't notice it until today because it happens during boot, and until an fsck ran this morning, it was hidden behind the "user-friendly" startup screen.

Aside: am I the only one who thinks the new boot screen really sucks? Sure, it looks nice, but I kind of like knowing what's actually going on when the system boots. I don't need to see all the gory details, but when the progress bar stalls for a really long time, I'd like to at least know what subsystem it stalled on.

This particular problem was simple: my swap partition wasn't getting turned on. A manual sudo swapon -a resulted in an error that said my lond-uuid-for-device was an invalid parameter.

Second aside: What's with the device UUIDs in Edgy? Where did that come from and why did they switch to it? I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing - in fact, it seems like a good idea. I just wonder where it came from.

Anyway, the solution was simple. Just run sudo mkswap /dev/some-long-uuid followed by sudo swapon -a and everything was great. I still don't know what caused the problem, though. My initial guess was the UUID symlink, but that turned out to be correct. I guess I'll see what happens the next time I boot it.