IT woes
After sorting out the issues regarding the eMudrha digital cetificate mess where some of my kit needed updating by hand, plus sorting out PHP upgrades on a couple of internal systems I turned my attention to the impending MacOS upgrade from 26.x to 27.x.
For a while now the Mac has been warning that some applications will no longer be supported. It looks like from MacOS 28.x onwards there will be no further support for Intel chips. Now, I have a Mac Mini with an Apple M2 chip so why does that bother me? It's because some applications were written for Intel and were using Apple's Rosetta glue-ware to translate their code and Rosetta will stop when MacOS 28 comes ( https://support.apple.com/en-us/102527 )
The only (as far as I know anyway!) issue I will have is that I use Barrier to allow the Mac to act as keyboard and mouse to other systems. Specifically I have a Windows 11 PC, the Mac and a Linux PC with the Mac in the middle. This gives me three screens, one each controlling the TS2000X and the FT450D, with the Mac being my main workhorse plus it has the two AirSPY SDRs attached. Audio inputs and outputs from each go via a mixer and a splitter making it an any-to-any setup. Barrier has not been updated for some years and is written for Intel architecture. So that stops when MacOS 28 hits.
Anyway... there is a more modern software called deskflow ( https://github.com/deskflow/deskflow ) which is effectively a Barrier replacement and is being maintained. The software installed fine on the Mac and the Windows PC - Barrier had to be stopped first and so I needed to find a keyboard and mouse for the Windows box in order to set things up. On to the Linux box... no software release for the 24.04 version installed there. Hmmm.
Oh well I did plan to upgrade to 26.04 anyway so may as well do that first. I've used do-release-upgrade before and all seemed ok, all until reboot.
error: symbol 'grub_memcpy' not found
Oh, joy. I vaguelly remember this happening before but I have no notes. At this stage it is worth mentioning that I think the global dash to get everything into AI is badly thought out and that peope may lose the ability to think and reason for themselves. Having spent my working life in higher education I've see the effect on students in the early days if IT. But I used duck.ai which was incredibly helpful in advising me things to try and do and whereas none of it was confusing with my IT background it helped enormously...
Advice in hand, all sugestions exhausted I generated a Lubunto 26.04 DVD, booted the PC into 'Try it' mode and used this, plus instructions from duck.ai to replace Grub and fix the issue.
After that hiatus the deskflow software went in fine and all is well... and documented!! Now all I need to do is upgrade the Mac but that can wait until the current ISS SSTV and tomorrow's SAQ broadcast are over.