New Computers

[Frank Cox]

Since my two main computers are about twelve years old I figured it's about time to replace them. (They still work, there's nothing wrong with them, but operating systems aren't getting any smaller and I've got the ram maxed out in both.)

After doing some looking around on ye olde Internet I ended up buying two Lenovo P3 workstations which were delivered yesterday.

I’ve spent most of the day setting them up and I’ll say that so far I’m very impressed with these machines.

The fan noise is pretty much nil. They’re even quieter than my existing computers and I always thought those were pretty quiet. You have to put your ear right by the case to hear the fans, otherwise you hardly even know it’s running.

I don't use Microsoft Windows so they can be ordered without that and you save $125 that way. These came with Ubuntu installed on them but I changed that to Rocky 9. The hardware appears to be 100% supported by EL9, so I’m doing a bit of speed learning on the differences between EL8 and EL9 since I’ve not used EL9 before. My existing computers are all on Rocky 8.

They’re even pretty. I never thought of computers in terms of appearance before but these cases were apparently designed by some kind of an industrial artist.

The CPUs are ISA level 3 so I should now be future-proofed in terms of running EL10 and beyond for at least a few years.

From ordering to "here's your boxes" took about a week and a half.

Bottom line: If any of you fine folks need a new workstation a Lenovo P3 is a pretty good bet.

[Carsten Kurz]

When you ordered these machines, did you investigate Linux compatibility specifically?

[Frank Cox]

I did indeed, since anything that didn't run Rocky Linux (RHEL knockoff) would be of no use to me.

Lenovo has a webpage listing their Linux compatible systems here:

https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/sol...rsonal-systems

I figured that if it's on the list I should be safe ordering it. And it turned out well.

If I need another computer for some reason I'll probably just order from them again. Beats getting something and playing a guessing game. If it doesn't run Linux it's of no value to me.

EDIT: I should add that the last time I bought a laptop I went to Staples with a "live flash drive". This runs Linux directly from the flash drive without touching the hard drive. It's a great way to test compatibility since you can just crank up the desktop and check if the video, networking, sound, etc. works. I did find one that worked and bought it, but it took all afternoon and I kept waiting for one of the workers to ask what I thought I was doing and maybe throw me out. Nobody paid any attention, though.

It's much easier to just order something that I know will work, obviously.

[Harold Hallikainen]

Frank, a question for you as a Linux expert. How are you going to transfer stuff from the old machine to the new ones? I've done it using G4L, where a drive image is transferred. I've got a VPS running Alma Linux, and I want to copy everything over to a new instance. In the past, I've done rsync of data and then a lot of reconfiguration. I'm wondering if I could rsync EVERYTHING from the existing instance to the new one except /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ (so the new instance maintains its new IP address).

Harold

[Randy Stankey]

I've never actually owned a Windows machine. I did have to use a Windows laptop for work when Cinemark issued me one. Because they used CC-Mail, at the time, I needed it to access my company e-mail. I suppose I could have gotten my own computer (iBook) to hack into CC-Mail but it would have been more trouble than it was worth. Just use the computer you've got. Right?

I got a few Windows machines from work at Mercyhurst when they offered buy-outs on leased machines. I got one for myself and one for my mother when she needed a new computer. Both of those were converted to Linux. They all just ran fine.

For copying files and data from hard drives, I use Carbon Copy Cloner for Mac and CloneZilla for LInux. Both can create bootable drives by making virtual clones of the original drive.

The computer guys at Mercyhurst used to spend a lot of time, running around, reinstalling Windows when people would mess things up until I recommended cloning of a generic installation onto a blank drive. Just set up a computer with an OS, just the way you want it then clone the drive onto a blank. Make a couple-three copies of that and keep the drives locked in your desk drawer or closet or some place safe. When you need it, just take out one of those drives and slap it into the computer you are working on and you're done! Since everybody who worked at Mercyhurst was supposed to have their home folder linked to the school's "X: drive" nobody should have to lose any of their data. IF they do, you can take the old drive back to your office, clone off the files and dump them on the person's X: drive where they should have been in the first place.a

I used to keep a live copy of Linux on a keychain drive, too. It used to really mess with people's minds when I changed their computer over to Linux! Then, reboot the computer and pull out the keychain to make their computer go back to normal. People always asked how I did that. I just told them, "It's complicated...nevermind..."

[Harold Hallikainen]

Very good1 For my desktop, I do an rsync backup to my virtual private server a few times a week. Once a month, I do a G4L "bare metal" backup to a USB drive. And then alwo once a month, all the files on my VPS are copied to Google Drive using gclone. Ideally, I will never lose data...

My question above has to do with migrating a VPS to another VPS. Because the new one will have a different partition size, I can't just do a drive image (which is hard to do on a VPS anyway), so I'm looking at just using rsync to copy every file from the existing VPS to the new one. But, to avoid messing up the IP address of the new one, I think I need to not copy over /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ . Otherwise, I THINK it would work. I guess I can try it and see what happens since the existing VPS continues to operate.

Harold

[Frank Cox]

In the case of these new computers, I was installing an updated operating system as well. This machine runs on EL9, my old machine was on EL8.

So I used an install image on a flash drive to do the initial installation, then I used a default desktop to install the rest of the software that I wanted. I used rsync to copy my home directory to a temporary directory on the new machine, then deleted the default home directory and renamed my temporary directory to my username.

Done. Set the IP addresses and hostnames to match the old machines, reload my crontabs and at jobs, and let 'er rip.

The rsync part took a fair while. I started setting these things up yesterday before lunch and really just finished removing the old machines and putting these into place an hour or so ago.

As a regular thing I have a cronjob that runs every night and backs up my data to a fileserver that lives in my basement. I find that if you have to do anything at all to make a backup it never happens, so this way I get a nightly backup without me having to take any action at all.

As for Harold's question, I've never tried rsync-ing an entire hard drive before but it can apparently be done:

https://ostechnix.com/backup-entire-...m-using-rsync/

[Barry Floyd]

We've used Lenovo Thinkstation" computers here at my day job office for the last several years. Wonderful computers. Because our work involves intense graphic processing (3D CADD terrain modeling for Civil Engineering) - we just switched over to brand new "IBUYPOWER" gaming computers because the graphics processing of the gaming computers was better than the Lenovo's. These new ones are lightning fast compared to the others.

[Frank Cox]

Since my monitors were the same age as my computers I ordered new monitors along with the computers.

What I had kind of forgotten about is the initial hassle of setting the monitors to be usable.

Seems like new monitors are always set on "supernova" and I always spend the following week fiddling with the controls to get them set to something reasonable and readable.

I'm pretty happy with these new computers overall. I discovered that there's no longer a need to make any changes in lvm.conf to allow trim to work. All you need to do is enable fstrim.timer and it just works.

I've been recompiling stuff and have managed to make most of what I need/want work again so I'm almost back to where I was before but with newer and faster hardware.

[Bruce Cloutier]

I, personally, am in the same boat where I should be replacing machines that are over a decade old. I only run Linux (Ubuntu and Mint) at home. In the office we avoid Microsoft where we can as well. MS is not even a payee in our QuickBooks accounting system. Not for nothing but so far I have managed to avoid any monthly software subscriptions. Screw that!

We have a couple of vendors (and customers) that like to send Excel attachments. We basically explain to them that Excel is a paid-for product and we do not have it (although we do where it lingers). Yes, Linux systems have LibreOffice and other applications that open them. But some of these people think Excel is a document processor and their spreadsheets are far more than simple Lotus 1-2-3 tables. I can open them but do not obviously end up with what they see. We pretty much only accept PDF attachments anyway.

But I am frustrated with all of it. Tech is decaying and becoming less reliable while people appear to notice (or care) less and less every day. I get everyone's fear of updates. I updated from Ubuntu 22.01 to 24.01 and lost my UEStudio application (among other things). I can get it back if I buy it again. I am sure that I can recover it one way or another but why should I have to delve into hours of problem resolution?

I am the first one to go off on a rant (Lewis Black is an idol) but I am one burnt out Boomer.

[Frank Cox]

Tech has become so complex that it's impossible for anyone to have a complete understanding of how it works. In the days of MSDOS and the Commdore 64 you could buy books listing everything that it does under the hood and if you wanted to put in the time you could trace every call in anything that you wanted to run.

Today it's simply not possible to attain that level of understadning. Everything interacts with everything else (in sometimes unexpected ways), and in the case of AI it's entirely a black box to everyone including the people who designed it.

I've sometimes written a function that worked. Why did it work? I have no idea - I put this in and got that out and so it's a success.

A lot of essential infrastructure is written that way now too.

The famous xkcd cartoon:
dependency.png

[Bruce Cloutier]

And they think this stuff can be relied upon to safely operate our vehicles. Not mine. But I am more fearful of what is happening on the road around me that I can't see coming.

I have gone out of my way to create something where I do completely understand how it works. When I try to explain why this is/was important I get a wide variety of responses most of which lead me to think they think I am an idiot. There is not much recognition, mostly I suppose because everyone is complacent in not understanding much of anything. But they sure have to have the latest and greatest (for better or worse) to brag about.

We encounter tech failures with greater and greater frequency as each day passes. I opened some schematics (in Altium) just this morning that haven't been touched in a few years since we need to do a revision. Some (not all) of the text on the pages are rotated 180 (upside down but still properly positioned). No idea. And I am supposed to then be 100% confident that every trace in the related circuit board layout is unaffected? So much for my confidence levels. Um... so far we are blaming Windows 10 since these were done under Win 7. No Linux version of Altium. Well... at least not when we obtained our seat. Not that that would be completely reliable.

Thanks for the cartoon but 2003? Our pick and place machines use FoxPro for the underlying database which appeared in early 90's, like in the Win 3.1 days or maybe even before. So you can push that weak link back another decade if not more. And... these stupid machines store the same data in more than one database. It forever gets out of sync and you have to be very careful to dance around that. For the most part we get the job done with them. I would have designed better code tho.