Over the weekend, I started a stats assignment that required me to use R. R runs in the terminal, but when you create plots, it brings up graphics. Normally in Windows, you can just copy the window and paste the new plot into whatever word processor you’re using. Linux Mint wasn’t letting me copy the plot – in fact, it wasn’t even letting me use alt-printscreen. Finally, I gave up and tried to install ksnapshot (I figured I could just screenshot a selected area). This is where my troubles began. Ksnapshot refused to install. Actually, everything refused to install. I restarted the computer and found this ridiculous scene on my desktop:
Seeing as I apparently had an abundance of screenshots, I gave up on ksnapshot and moved on with my life.
Today I tried to update my system through mintUpdate. Unfortunately, none of the updates went through. I called Tyler and Jake in and we tried installing something – anything – else. Nothing worked, and I kept getting this message in the console:
“dpkg failed in buffer read”
It turns out that Festival (the text-to-speech program) was completely ruining everything. We tried removing it through the terminal, but to no avail. We tried simply accessing it, but the system was having none of it. In the end, we had to go into recovery mode and do some weird file system stuff (I’ll have to ask Jake and Tyler on the details of what exactly it was I did). So far the system seems to be functioning again, but if Tyler and Jake weren’t around I’m sure I’d still be struggling to figure out what the hell was going on.
We ran a file system check and repair utility. Apparently you had a couple of corrupted inodes!