[TriLUG] Upgrade of Desktop

Aaron Joyner aaron at joyner.ws
Mon May 17 14:26:10 EDT 2010


The essence of your question is a classic SysAdmin problem.  "How do I
backup my system, and reliably restore it to new hardware?"
Fortunately for Linux, there's no licensing, copy protection or other
commercial concerns, so it's actually a walk in the park (like it
ought to be).

Google search for "linux backup and restore":
http://tinyurl.com/332bfas

First result is a very helpful post from ubuntuforums.com entitled
"Howto: Backup and restore your system!":
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=35087

It summarizes the steps I was going to type out which are essentially
tar, scp, tar, then fix the bootloader via grub.

If you encounter problems or have additional questions, please don't
hesitate to ask.
Aaron S. Joyner


On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 2:16 PM, John Broome <jbroome at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 14:03, Matt <matt at noway2.thruhere.net> wrote:
>> I have a situation and could really use a few suggestions with that I am
>> hoping someone has some good ones for.  At work, we have an older
>> desktop PC that we use as a Linux server in one of our labs and I am the
>> one who maintains it.   The PC has a copy of Ubuntu 8.04 on it that is
>> running under an LVM.  I also think it was formatted as an EXT-2.  For
>> some reason, using the LVM was the only way I was able to get the
>> distribution to install.
>
> ext2==yikes
>
>> Does anyone have any suggestions for the best method to copy the old
>> system over, but upgrade the file system in the process?
>
>
> Do a fresh install of (i assume Ubuntu), and do the following (which i
> stole from the ubuntu bot on freenode):
>
>  To replicate your packages selection on another machine (or restore
> it if re-installing), you can type << aptitude
>                  --display-format '%p' search '?installed!?automatic'
>> ~/my-packages >>, move the file "my-packages" to the other machine,
> and
>                  there type << sudo xargs aptitude --schedule-only
> install < my-packages ; sudo aptitude install
>
> then rsync over the data for specific applications you're using on the
> old machine to the new one.
> --
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>



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