Following the slight difficulties of last week, I had a hard week on the computer front: indeed, on Monday, I received my 2007 macbook from the repair shop, with a new video card, courtesy of Apple. Unfortunately, this started a series of problems. First, the old macbook stopped recognizing the NVIDIA video and, while it worked under VESA, the system got unstable to the point that I had no choice but to install Maverick Meerkat (Ubuntu 10.10) to make it work again… This proved rather unsuccessful in that the new installment is periodically login me out, especially when I am under Firefox or Acrobat… (Most items are working, though, including the bluetooth Apple mouse… Anyway, Pierre kindly offered to take a look over the weekend.) This was not the end of my worries, though, as I stupidly typed sudo chown xian on my new macbook while on / (when I thought I was on /home/xian). This was very very s.t.u.p.i.d. (I committed this major error during Pierre’s talk two days ago, while typing my post on SMC²!) and it also ruined the whole system, despite a manual attempt at recreating the ownership of the system directories… This also ended in a reinstallation of Maverick Meerkat from the start, which surprisingly did not produce the same outcome as the first time, with hardly anything working. Even under the minimal Ubuntu configuration. So this morning I once again started from scratch, using the whole disk and letting the installation CD make all the decisions. Except for the sound (!), everything seems to be working now. Including the webcam as shown above. (Once I installed Isight.) Then tonight, the hinge of the macbook Air I keep at home (and often borrowed by my daughter) broke, a frequent problem with macbook air‘s as I brought one from the department to the repair shop on Monday in exchange for my repaired macbook… And to make the day complete, this morning a neighbouring car kindly pointed out to me a flat tire on my car! I am glad I recovered my bike with a new axis earlier this week…