Migrating Ubuntu system on a new hard drive

Posted by on December 26, 2010 · Leave a Comment 

This boxing day, I got me some extra RAM for me desktop!

Installation required turning off the machine beforehand, and when I tried to brought it up, it became evident that it was not just the startup that got killed with that restart. My old hard drive that was doing some interesting noises once from time to time started dieing in real time. I wanted to save myself some hours of reinstalling new system, backing up data, and customizing things – I do have backups of most important stuff, but owning Ubuntu means that I have to do a system reinstall every couple of releases (somehow it’s the video support that breaks completely every now and then). So this is what I did:

  1. Went to the store, got a new hard drive, hooked it up as a master (sda), hooked the old one as a slave (sdb).
  2. Booted from Ubuntu Live CD, and did this:
  3. sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of =/dev/sda bs=2M
  4. Fired up GParted to grow the existing partition (the new drive was like four times as big as the old one), which involved removing the swap, growing the partition, and recreating the swap at the end of the disk.
  5. Unhooked the old drive, rebooted.
  6. Corrected swap’s entry in /etc/fstab to refer to the right UUID.
  7. Rebooted again.

Voilà, my old everything was on the new hard drive, which I hope will live as long as old one did (R.I.P. 26 September 2006 – 26 December 2010).

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Linux user surviving on Windows

Posted by on June 5, 2010 · 2 Comments 

I am an avid Linux user and I consider Linux to be a better OS (c’mon it has glitches too). I have been successfully avoiding Windows for the past four years except for the rare times when vital software refused to run under Linux or Wine, as was the case with Garmin update utility for my GPS.

Since I’ve started my internship, however, I am using a Windows laptop and the first couple of weeks were a pain. Some of it has been cured by these utilities I’ve discovered (in addition to Cygwin, of course):

  • PuTTYcyg – allows you to use your PuTTY terminal (with nice fonts, expandable screen, etc.) as a Cygwin terminal instead of Windows console / xterm. Try it, it’s super easy to install.
  • Power menu – allows you to stick your windows on top of others so that you can have a terminal open in the foreground and be doing things in the background (browsing, for example) without having to constantly bring the terminal back up. It also supports changing opacity for individual windows. The best part of it, however, is the fact that all those options are available from the context menu of the window.
  • MSVDM – Microsoft Virtual Desktop Manager from Microsoft PowerToys for Windows. Allows you similar functionality as the workspace switcher applet in GNOME.

I still haven’t found anything good to use as a GUI editor like my favourite gedit =[ I am using Notepad++ for now, but it seems to be too bloated and a bit dumb to my taste.

Update: GNOME project does have Win32 binaries for gedit. ;D

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