Mon, Aug 11, 2008
Migration
Posted to Technology category
If you can read this, it means that I have nearly completed my migration from the old laptop to the new laptop.
Everything was backed up from /home on the old laptop to my server, which was pretty quick because I have been using rsync for backups. Then I copied everything from the backups into a staging directory and did some cleanup (so the full backup still exists). I renamed .kde and .mozilla to .kde.old and .mozilla.old so they would be available for reference and cleaned out most of the other config files so they would not step on the clean ones on the new machine.
The staging files are still downloading (rsync again) to the /home partition on the new laptop, but things have gotten far enough that I have my emails accessible here, and my Konqueror bookmarks are set up and working.
Next I attack Firefox, which is a different set of bookmarks, mostly ones that need Flash. I probably need to redownload the Flash plugins, but they should work better since the new machine is 32bit.
VMWare will need to wait until tomorrow, and I need to decide whether to load VMWare Workstation or VMWare Server.
This keyboard is driving me nuts: I am used to the old one, which had only one Control key, with the Delete key in an odd place. It will take some time to adjust to a more normal layout.
Other than that, I really like this machine. The screen is a little smaller than the previous one, but not enough to be annoying (I think it may be a similar screen layout with smaller dots) and having the screen shiny instead of matte is less of a glare problem that I had feared, at least so far.
The new machine is enormously quieter: if it has fans, I can't hear them, and the drives are silent, too. I haven't tested the sound system yet, but it can't be worse than the previous one. It would be nice to have speakers that actually speak again.