Iovei I thought “What the Hay?”. I booted my dual boot machine with Xubuntu 12.04 and all was peachy. Tried a large update with Update manager, then powered down as normal. The next time I boot up my mouse was dead and there was no connectivity to the internet! What to do? At least I could get the session started, as normal but sans mouse. I plugged in a USB mouse and it auto detected. Back to Update Manager, which then did a “Partial Update”. This fixed itself, and now all is back to normal.
Xubuntu updates are a little like black magic to me. After booting up normally I then tried an update with update manager, and after a few minutes I did not see any activity, so I powered down as usual. There was nothing out of the ordinary. The next system start my PS2 mouse was dead and I had no connectivity to the internet. Xubuntu said that my computer had crashed, but I am unsure how.
I plugged in an additional USB mouse, which was thankfully detected. I started Update Manager, which said I could only do a “Partial Upgrade”. This fixed all the problems. It even started downloading the upgrades by itself, even though it told me I had no internet connectivity.
A fresh boot later and all is well. Whew.
Black-magic to me too. Ran Mint-Debian-xfce since its inception, until an upgrade damaged the GUI so badly it could not be re-installed. The forum-snots gave me the usual ‘get an iPAD’ advice, except one guy who posted the link for Xubuntu-LTS, which also has xfce.
Now I must re-learn grub to tell it that the optical-drives are not SCSI. Always something.