Bluecore is now officially dead, and only a miracle could bring it back to a usable state. During the next week I’ll be taking it to technical support, so the current condition will hopefully be temporary.

Some days ago, I came up with a joke in ##shadowm regarding a hypothetical “Reicore” laptop, which would have some awesome NVIDIA GPU and a quad-core processor. This is most likely not going to happen, yet I have reused the computer name on my new, temporary laptop, which used to belong to my father and was, in fact, bought exclusively for his use during 2010.

My main reasons for choosing “Reicore” as its hostname over another “<color>core” combination are the following:

1. Like its namesake’s namesake*, Reicore is intended for backup purposes until Bluecore or a new laptop come to replace it.
2. It’s a nice reminder so I don’t complain about inefficiencies in working computers again. That seems to bring bad luck.

Last night, after shutting down bluecore and leaving it alone for hours, the BIOS boot stage failed and I had to turn it off and try again. Today that’s not the case, and bluecore won’t boot.

I do not understand why is this, or what could be the cause, since in both opportunities the laptop went through a successful hibernation cycle from Linux. There doesn’t seem to be any relation to the AC adapter or battery status, since I tried turning it on with different power source combinations. The GPU and display screen don’t come up, and the keyboard doesn’t work — the only visible indication of (in)activity is the two blinking Caps Lock and Num Lock LEDs, which I saw before when Linux wouldn’t resume from suspend-to-RAM properly back in the 2.6.26 days, two years ago.

This means that my files, configuration and software are currently inaccessible and unusable, save for a ~2 weeks old complete system backup on my 2 TiB external hard disk, which I could use with the machine I’m using right now, blackcore. There are various problems with this desktop computer, however, that make it barely usable with Linux. In particular, GL applications crash X.org thanks to VIA’s nearly nonexistent IGP support, and there’s nearly no means of 2D acceleration.

The current plan is to take bluecore to the technical support people. Hopefully they’ll prove their worth in money this time.