Miskatonic University PressI upgraded both my home and work laptops to Ubuntu 18.04, the newest release. Both went perfectly smoothly (not like four years ago) and nothing about the interface has changed, which is just how I like it. No tweaks necessary to make the workspace grid look the way I want, or anything else like that. I freshened and recompiled Emacs and Org, and used Conforguration to move R to the new 3.5.1.
On my home laptop I also fixed a problem I’d noticed a little while ago: I had no swap space. I don’t know why or when—maybe at the last upgrade?—my swap partition stopped being mounted on boot, so I had my eight gigs of RAM but the eight gigs of swap was unavailable. This was only a problem when loading large data sets in R or editing long audio files in Audacity. With gparted I set /dev/sda3 to be type linux-swap (after carefully triple-checking that was the right partition) and then I used blkid to find the UUID of this partition. I edited /etc/fstab, rebooted, and all was well. (See this Ask Ubuntu answer for details.)
