I got to work, did my daily apt-get upgrade in the background, while i suddenly noticed something strange. My apps were no longer starting. I already had a browser and some terminals open, so i looked at the problem a bit closer. It seemed that apt-get tried to update my libc6 package, which was b0rked and caused some mayhem everywhere in my system. A quick launchpad search confirmed my guess, libc6 upgrade was the culprit. Since i wasn’t root on any of my terminals, and sudo and su crashed right away, i downloaded the previous version of the libc6 package ( luckily wget still working fine ;) ), and rebooted with a livecd. As a sidenote, Gentoo still has the best damn rescue-cd’s known to man. ;) I installed the older version of libc6 from a chroot, and voila, all fine and dandy!

A bit later, sdog pointed me to another post about the incident.

People around the world that are pissed off about this problem, or are moaning/flaming to the devs, please, get a life. As you might have noticed, the word “ALPHA” is used pretty abundantly all over your beloved Hardy system, and the UWN and release pages clearly mention “Pre-releases of Hardy are “NOT” encouraged for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage.”. You’ve been warned. Deal with it.

Anyways, kudos to the Ubuntu devs for their swift and prompt fix to this problem! Hardy is shaping up to be a very nice distribution!