I would honestly just back up my files and start over with a fresh new install. I have never been successful in copying everything over, especially not if you are planning on changing the file systems. I know you mentioned that you don’t really want to do that, but that’s my 2 cents
29 years here, get my first computer in 2011 after using it sometimes in my sister’s house. Never used ctrl+backspace in my life and did not know it existed. Edit maybe you can try something like that? addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/…/shortkeys/
Make the new filesystem, rsync the old SSD to the new one (making sure to use rsync -ax to copy everything properly, also add -H if you use hardlinks), update fstab UUID, regenerate GRUB configuration and you’re good to go.
I have a 10 year old install that’s survived moving several disks and computers, it works just fine.
This is likely what I will do now that I have given it some thought. This will bring over all of my installed apt and snap packages, right? And they will both be aware and know how to update from there?
I have the NVMe prepped. It has a fresh Ubuntu install of the same version, but on btrfs. I could probably even snapshot it before I get started to make sure I can roll back and try again if I fuck up. And worst case, I can just reinstall the OS on that partition, as it would touch my existing install. It feels pretty safe to try. Worst thing that can go wrong is I waste my time.
Yeah, from the software’s point of view unless you need some extra rsync flags as some have pointed, you end up with an identical view of the files on there, they’ll be mounted exactly at the same places and everything. Just a different filesystem and drive behind it. People have been doing that for decades, before even Linux.
As long as all the attributes like user/group/mode and symlinks are preserved, most distros won’t notice a thing with that method. There’s no filesystem-specific special sauce to make it work or hidden flags or anything, even snaps and flatpaks.
This is not like Windows where your options are clone the partition or reinstall. Linux is a lot simpler and only cares that the files are where they should be with the right permissions.
Specifically, the weak spot is in “maple tree,” a new data structure system for VMAs introduced in Linux kernel 6.1 that replaced the “red-black trees” and relied on the read-copy-update (RCU) mechanism.
Maple Tree also recently caused intermittent failures in some of my CPU-intensive tasks, in such an obscure way that I only found out by dumb luck that it was a kernel bug. I expect it will be great eventually, but it’s feeling pretty rough at the moment. I’m thinking this code should have had more testing and maturing before going mainline.
Damn. If the Maple Tree code is bugging out under CPU-intensive tasks, that would explain a lot about how my system’s been behaving since I moved to 6.1. Thanks for the heads-up, and I guess I should compile another new kernel.
This is off topic, so I will leave it as a comment below, but last week I had the bright idea to wipe the NVMe SSD to prepare it for this migration. I totally forgot that I had my MBR and grub on that SSD. So the next time I rebooted, it wouldn’t boot back up. It took me like two hours to get grub back on it and boot it back up.
I’ve been looking for a TV for awhile now, and I’ve found that there aren’t really any practical dumb ones. There are a few models, but they’re more expensive and have lower specs, cheaper panels, fewer menu options, etc.
Overall, the smart TVs are going to be cheaper/better because the company plans to make money on target ads, data mining, etc. Just don’t connect it or enter a wi-fi password. Sadly that’s where we’re at now.
I recently got an Alienware, and I wouldn’t recommend it to my worst enemy. I got a great deal on it through someone who works at Dell. But it is so controlling. I changed the fans because the ones that came with it were too loud, and now it always complains at boot that the fans are not working properly, and I need to click “ok” for it to boot.
It also has proprietary hardware in it. The liquid cooler and PSU are so custom that they wouldn’t fit in any other chassis, and I doubt I could get another PSU to fit in this chassis. Oh, and the motherboard is an L shape, so the I/Os wouldn’t line up with the window if I wanted to swap it out. All the software that came with it was so garbage that I originally re-installed windows. But there was still issues like it constantly rebooting. So I eventually just installed Linux and haven’t looked back.
Hi there, fellow Alienware owner. May I ask which model you own and which linux distro you ended up installing? I’m terrified of making the jump for several reasons but graphics driver issues are high on the list. (I’m with an m15r7)
I have the Aurora R15. I installed Ubuntu. Being that mine is a desktop, it doesn’t have the graphics driver issues that you are probably thinking of.
I used to have a work laptop (a Dell as well, IIRC, but it was years ago) with an Nvidia graphics card that I installed Ubuntu on, and it had tons of graphics driver issues. I think it had something to do with using integrated and discrete graphics together that caused the problem. I had really bad screen tearing, and IIRC, I eventually installed the open source driver to fix that. I might still have the page bookmarked somewhere with what I did to fix the screen tearing. However, that tanked my performance. It was a work laptop, so it wasn’t a huge deal for me. I just didn’t want screen tearing because it irritated me. Oh, and after that, if it ever went to sleep, it would crash on wake like 70% of the time. So I set it to never sleep, even if the button was pressed or the lid was closed.
Yeah, it was nothing but problems. Best I can say is boot from a live USB or possibly even use another SSD you have lying around, but don’t wipe your existing one until you are very sure you don’t want to ever go back.
I see… I presumed you would have a laptop since OP was talking about laptops. Just like you, I’ve installed Linux on another dell laptop some years ago and had a very similar experience with hybrid/Optimus. I’ve heard that drivers for Nvidia and laptops have improved a lot since but I am still not sure it’d work as it should.
Thanks for suggesting the live USB option, I didn’t think of it. I’ll investigate!
Others have covered PRIMARY vs CLIPBOARD (the separation of which I find to be extremely useful).
For Vim, you have access to these both via the registers + (CLIPBOARD) and * (PRIMARY). So, for example, to paste from your CLIPBOARD selection, you’d do this:
Buying a laptop that can run SD will cost you more than twice as much as an equivalent desktop. A desktop will also remain upgradeable for the next 10 years or so.
I’m partially disabled and stuck in a bed ~80% of my days. The ergonomics of a laptop on my custom bedside stand that can swing out of my way and 180° to use at my desk is ideal. I have a spare monitor on an arm I use when I really need it, but I hate having any regular keyboard or even being stuck with just a mouse. The touch pad, keyboard location, and screen make an ideal ergonomic situation. Like I have several mains outlets built into my stand, and the wiring is managed so that I don’t get boxed in or tangled. I hate wireless stuff going dead. When adding the cost of the screen to a PC and all the peripherals, and then accessibility mounts, it costs more for me. My only option for a tower is two computers and remotely logging in from a laptop. It is an option but not one I like.
While it’s not an immediate solution, Framework laptops are way ahead of the curve in terms of open sourcing their firmware, and being open and Linux-friendly in general. The Framework 16 should be out by the end of the year and will support an external gpu.
All good points. Fair enough. That said, don’t be too quick to dismiss the remote desktop option. Not sure when you last tried, but these days with software like remmina, connecting remotely to a desktop (particularly one on your lan) is indistinguishable to sitting in front of it. Sure, you can’t do things like play games at any useable framerate, but for something like Stable Diffusion I would expect it to be ideal.
I was also kinda looking forward to connecting with an old friend over battlefield or counter strike as a bonus. That is the one constraint I will end up giving up first if I am forced to, but it gets damn lonely living like this. It will be 10 years of laying around all the time this coming February, I don’t worry about the stuff I can’t change, but I am way past due for having some real fun with friends. People are pooling together to help me out but it is like a one time and place kinda thing where I need to come up with the “thing” I need and be done with it. I’m grateful and all, I just need to make the best of it and not be too much of a burden. I have a max of $3k to play with but need to figure this out in the next few days. The lower I can keep the ask the better off I will be. The Alienware was $1450 and for a 12GBV card, that sounded great.
Ah right, I see. Sounds like you’re making the right choices in the context of your unfortunate situation. Yeah, playing games pretty much rules out a remote desktop setup. Sorry I don’t have any more answers to your questions, but you’re clearly asking the right ones.
A solid desktop for stabile diffusion combined with a Chromebook good enough for a remote desktop client is significantly cheaper than a laptop capable of stable diffusion. Not counting future upgradability
The amount of changes you’d need to make to get Linux to boot on a different partition format and drive would be a lot of work. It would be much faster to install a new copy of Linux to the nvme drive and copy the files from the ssd post install before decommissioning the old drive.
Thanks for the reply. I’m really dreading migrating files manually, because I use this as my server, so all my stuff would be down for an extended period of time while I migrated. :(
Is this mostly for fileserving or apps? If you’re using it as a Fileserver share the relevant parts of the ssd while you rsync all of it over to help ease downtime.
You can also install the nvme through a virtual machine and pass /dev/nvme_whatever to the vm. Then rsync everything over using ssh then reboot the whole machine using the nvme drive for the os (make sure to use UEFI for the vm on kvm).
For apps kinda the same vm deal leave the ssd up and configure the nvme install as needed then copy whatever data you need over before rebooting.
It’s more convoluted to do it that way but it will reduce downtime
I disagree, you usually just need to get /boot and your EFI things right on the new disk, rsync stuff over and fix any references to old disks in /etc/fstab and maybe your grub config and you are done. I have done this migration>10 times over the years onto different filesystems, partition Layout and raid configurations and it’s never been particularly hard.
That’s true if everything is supported on the current kernel. I might just be very out of touch/date here but is btrfs built in to the kernel? I was thinking he’d need to have a different kernel/loaded modules on it
Well dang it’s been a while since I tried it then! I keep hearing how it’s unstable in comments so I tend to assume its fairly new even when I should know better lol
Most of the time, it’s enough to copy the whole EFI partition to the new machine and update whatever boot entries are in there to point to the right new partitions.
In case of a switch to something like zfs, it’s a bit more involved and you need to boot a live Linux, chroot into the new “/” with /boot mounted and /dev, /proc, /sys bind mounted into the chroot.
Then you can run the distro-appropriate command to reinstall/ update grub into the EFI partition and they will usually take care of adding the right drivers.
Xfce overall, but I like MATE a lot as well. Just give me a traditional desktop experience, I don’t need mobile-like options on a desktop.
I actually switched to MATE primarily because I like its suite of software a bit more (calculator, file manager, file archiver) than Xfce’s, though I use some of MATE’s stuff (Caja mainly) on Xfce on my laptop.
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