Moving to New Computer pt.2
I cannot be sure why exactly, but after waiting ages for the iso to be compiled (and trying that a couple of times to be sure) I just couldn’t get the remastersys backup distro to work. I managed to get an ISO image fine, and I could install it on the USB stick, and then boot from that same stick. However when I tried to install onto the new machine’s hard disk it failed during the file copying process (306% in).
After three failed attempts I’ve fallen back to:
- installing Ubuntu desktop 10.4.2 onto the new machine.
- After that I installed both openssh and nfs-common and nfs-kernel-server so that I can copy files from the old machine to the new machine.
- mount the / of the old machine on /old on middenface [code] james@middenface:/old$ sudo mount sternhammer:/export /old [/code]
- made a backup of etc on middenface (to restore a few key files after the next step) (make sure that you do this preserving symbolic links as symbolic links and also the group and owner permissions etc)
- copy etc var home usr using [code] sudo cp -fLRpv -t / /old/dir [/code]
The whole thing has taken a lot longer than it ought to have done, and I’ve had to do lots of manual configuration as well. One of the mistakes I made was run a gksudo nautilus session and use the GUI to copy the files, which borked the ownership etc and also turned all the symbolic links in etc rc?.d into files, so I had to delete them all and then run the init update command for each of the packages installed (although I cheated a little and went straight into a distro upgrade to 10.10 and let that do the hard work for me).
My other major pain was getting the sound working through the HDMI. There are a number of good HOWTOs on ubuntuforums.org and there is even one specific to the acer revo R3700 which is what I followed. However this may not be at all necessary, as there is a wee check box on the sound menu that says “enable window and button sounds” and when I checked it everything just started working, so I’m not sure how much of the painful faffing around was really necessary.
Related articles
- Moving Ubuntu to New Computer (themself.org)
- Linux Invasion! (neitshade.wordpress.com)
- Installing and running Ubuntu Linux (myipc.wordpress.com)
- Burn, Backup and Clone Disks in Linux Using the ‘dd’ Command (helpdeskgeek.com)
- How to Install And Configure Apache In Ubuntu (maketecheasier.com)
- Things Every New Linux User Should Know (geekum.wordpress.com)
- I Have Installed Ubuntu…What’s Next? (maketecheasier.com)
- Backing Up and Recovery [Part1] (techtimely.wordpress.com)
In compiling this post I discovered an interesting feature in apache security that won’t let you post a directory path in etc because it thinks it could be malicious code looking to change the server settings, so you need to assume that where you see the etc paths that the spaces should be slashes (/) to make the path work