My main hard drive appears to have crashed. I am not sure what happened. But at least my operation system partion is no longer working. I am using Gentoo Linux as my working Os so my data is safe (since my data is on other partion on the hard drive). I have now any reason to believe that my hard drive is dying. The fault is that an sector(s) on it have gone bad. This sector(s) is located by chance on my operating system disk partion. It could have been located on my home partion, if that would have happened I would have lost my data. When the sector fail the hard drive made an click sound (details here) and I lost the partion and everything on it.
This means that I need to get an new hard drive for my main computer. I use my main computer to write on and work out images for this website and more. I found an 1TB hard drive (link here in German) in Flensburg in an computer store there. The price is 65,95€. This however means an bad hole in my budget. But I cannot do any work without my working computer. Any donations to help with this are welcomed.
This also means that I can only write in limited ability about what is happening in Iceland, Europe and the world for the next few days. Since I hope to get the hard drive on Friday. But it takes me up to 3 to 5 days to install Gentoo Linux on my computer again. I use Gentoo Linux at least until I figure out if there is an *BSD version out there that works for Desktop as intended (I have tested PC-BSD and its not for me at the moment).
Ubuntu (Debian based Linux) Free software. Supported. You can’t go wrong with Ubuntu. I’ve been running it for several years and it keeps getting better. 12.04 LTS (long-term support) is a good choice. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) Beta 1 is just released and I intend to upgrade from 13.10 today. 13.10 is great but is only supported for nine months. Oh, and you can try it out without installing it. Give it a try, Jon.
I also use both 12.04 and 13.04(?) , at home ,no problems, great online support (WWW knowledge base (with Google search) incredible) …
I use Kubuntu (I don’t like Gnome) for my laptop (it barley works anyway). I don’t want to use Kubuntu or binary distro for my Desktop work. Since I like to customize it greatly. Something that I cannot do with an binary distro. I also need to use few things that are not provided in Kububtu (Ubuntu). One of this thing being the Java binaries so I can use my home-bank properly.
You can also consider using Archlinux. Its somewhere between Gentoo and Ubuntu in terms of customising.
They have a great Repository called AUR where people prepare there own source packages.
I also have a older hard drive lying around at my place. If you would benefit from it I can send it to you. It’s somewhere in the region of 200gb.
I should get new 1TB hard drive on Monday. That works. I am generally on the move away from Linux to *BSD. I just have moved my server computer so far. I am just not yet ready to move my Desktop at present time. But I am going to move once I am ready to do so.