After roughly two days of frantic partitioning, cursing, re-partitioning, cursing, downloading, re-installing, and cursing some more, I've done it: my computer finally works as normal, and is now upgraded to Karmic Koala. This state of affairs started off, as these things often do, with something completely unrelated. I was hoping to test out Toribash, a stick-figure beat-em-up that came with fervent recommendations. I had it on good authority that the Linux version was somewhat short of working, so I installed the Windows version under Wine instead. I was soon presented with a very sluggish title screen; the frame-counter clocked in at a whopping 7 fps, leaving something to be desired in the useful interactivity department.

After some rummaging through various Ubuntu fora, I came across some instructions for improving the performance of integrated Intel video chipsets under newer kernel builds. Add a repo, install a couple of packages, change device settings in xorg.conf - all relatively mundane stuff. Five minutes later, I rebooted my computer...

...and never got beyond the login screen, which froze up promptly. Ouch. I booted into recovery mode, rolled back the xorg.conf changes, started X - still nothing. I dusted off my knowledge of command-line wireless utilities and popped open some troubleshooting guides under lynx. One of these guides helpfully suggested that I look through the apt logs and manually roll back package installs until it worked. I wisely decided this was excessive and opted for a fresh installation of Ubuntu instead.

Only one problem: back when I first loaded Ubuntu onto this MacBook, I lacked the wisdom to create separate root and home partitions. I booted from Live CD, opened GParted, resized my existing Ubuntu partition, created a new partition, and copied everything in /home over to the new partition. Total time spent: roughly 6 hours, most of it in the copying phase. I booted into recovery mode to sanity-check that the new partition mounted properly.

It worked, thankfully, and so I was able to install Karmic over what had previously been my root partition. I booted into recovery mode one last time, edited the fstab to pick up my mount, rebooted - and voila! I had a working install, complete with all my old config. This experience convinced me that human-readable config files will always be superior to the supreme crapitude of the Windows registry; you can easily port settings between different systems and OS versions with relative confidence that everything will just work.

At this stage, I'm still missing some essential packages. I haven't completely restored my development environment, and I'm short creature comforts like VLC and codecs and Skype; I hope to have these installed very soon. That part is trivial, though, thanks in no small part due to the excellent work Canonical has put into apt-get and the software repos over the years.

So, to make a long story short:

• Take everything you read on Linux fora with a heavy but non-lethal dose of sodium chloride.
• Don't adjust configs unless you've read the manual and have a decent idea of what you're doing. (There's some wiggle room here for toy installs; computer users should always be encouraged to play around! Just don't knock out your main development system.)
• Always separate your root and home partitions. (I think these should be separate by default, and I'm not alone.