I just went through a fairly major ordeal with my desktop. I was trying to recompile a kernel the Debian way. “The Debian way” is apparently catastrophic failure. Upon reboot I discovered that my Master Boot Record was so damaged that I was unable to boot to any kernel, and unable to reinstall without formatting the partition flat. Very upsetting. I made several attempts to fix the problem, but nothing worked. I also tried to reinstall onto my secondary hard drive, but ran into similar problems, and my aged motherboard, already flaky, started throwing Drive Errors on boot.

I finally got Debian reinstalled, but with the flaky motherboard I needed something else. What I found was a new motherboard, processor, RAM and case for the same money as a lesser processor. It was significantly faster than what I was used to, though I will still have to look further into CPU-detection, because dmesg is not reporting its full clock speed, but the BIOS, I think, is.

The upshot is that I didn’t use tasksel and I didn’t use dselect to install non-basic packages, so my system is pretty lean. I am always pleased to not have printing daemons installed when I don’t need them. Now of course I want to export my installed packages to a file to keep safe, so I can do one fat apt-get at the beginning of any installation.

There is always lots to do.