So, I may have been a little optimistic. It seems the confuser was having a little joke: working fine when upstairs but falling over as soon as it was put back in the cellar; even if you ran it’s power from the same upstairs socket. I put that in the past tense; I sincerely hope that’s not another manifestation of optimism as I have spent the last two nights (till 3:30am last night; till half one tonight) installing a new motherboard and getting the system to boot without having to re-install linux. I finally got it to do that (after initially getting kernel panics at the probe-ide stage) by going back a patchlevel or two with the kernel.
I got quite used to Ubuntu while sorting it all out; it’s dead handy just to be able to run it off the CD. I was quite tempted to install it, but that desktop would be wasted on the cellar. Maybe I’ll move to Debian, if I can find the energy.
Anyway, bedward. Tomorrow, I’ll put it back in the cellar and invoke all seven circles of superstition.