Following the crash of my hard drive right before leaving Kyoto, I bought a cheap Compaq Presario CQ57 to reinstall Ubuntu 12.04 over the weekend (and have a laptop available before leaving for Australia…)  It took about one hour to install from the DVD and everything seems to be working out of the box. The only part where I wasted time was the partition as I kept the original Windows 7 as dual boot, in case I recover my Macbook Pro early enough (and can get rid of this as a safety backup)… I had to remove one of the four partitions found on the computer to create unallocated space for the three Linux partitions (swat, / and /home, which took a while sine I had to do it under Windows 7 (which went for ever to update revisions I was not the slightest interested in…)

I wrote the above yesterday night and, this morning, Gilles Barés, computer wizz (and fantastic photographer!) manages to recover the contents of my hard-drive by reading it on another Macbook with Ubuntu on it… As it happens, there was nothing wrong with the hard-drive in the end, “simply” the motherboard was doing funny things..! I thus have now a new operational Macbook Pro with Ubuntu 12.04! Plus this backup Compaq I may leave at home for emergencies…