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Summary: I'm trying to back up a failing harddisk and bring programs over to a new system. I'd also like to transition off Windows. I'm hoping my fellow Soylentils can share their experiences and help ease the transition. I realize I'm probably not the only person who may be looking to do such things, so I'm hoping that the replies will be helpful to someone who later comes upon this story.
Background: I have a 10-year-old HP laptop with an AMD Athlon64 3200+ running Windows XP/SP3 with an 80 GB hard disk Over the past 10 years I've installed well over 100 programs and done countless tweaks and modifications to their defaults. Thanks to the generosity of a kind friend, I'm getting a Dell Latitude with a fresh install of Win 7 Pro which has an Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 2.53GHz and a 500 GB hard disk.
Goal: Full-disk backups of both systems and as-painless-as-possible installation of programs on the new system. Ultimately transition off Windows to a Linux/BSD distro.
Challenges: When I run SMART on the HP's 80 GB disk, it reports "Prefailure" for: "Raw Read Error Rate", "Spin Up Time", "Reallocated Sector Count", "Seek Error Rate", and "Spin Retry Count." A couple years ago, I tried doing a full-disk backup. In preparation, I did a CHKDSK /R to relocate bad sectors and fix any other errors. Then I ran a Live CD version of Clonezilla (2.0.1-5-i486) to backup the disk to an external USB hard disk; it happily chewed along for several hours until it hit a disk error and then just stopped. I'd like to use something which is more determined to retry challenged sectors and not die on any errors — ideally it would report details on any non-recoverable sectors, etc.
As for installing my old programs on the new machine, I surely miss the pre-registry days when one could just zip up a directory on one machine, unzip it on another, and you were good to go! Example: I use Pale Moon as my browser. I've set customizations for fonts, character sets, etc. as well as having updated the internal spelling dictionary. What is the easiest way to bring the program over to the new system? Similarly, how would I bring over such programs as: Mozilla Thunderbird, PuTTY, HexChat, and VLC?
Lastly: I'd like to get off the Windows merry-go-round. I have considerable experience in using Unix userland commands (ls, find, gawk, sed, etc.) but negligible experience in installing Linux/BSD/etc. The new box has sufficient memory (6 GB) that I could conceivably run Windows in a VM. I've never done that on a PC before. (Many years ago I worked at IBM testing their VM operating system, so I'm familiar with the concepts.) So, I'm open to folks' experience on how to go about doing a P2V (physical to virtual) of the new system. Based on what I've read, I'd like to stay away from systemd, so that strikes out a few of the selections mentioned in: What Distro Do Soylentils Use? What has your experience been? What do you recommend?
I know there's probably something I don't know; what else should I be asking? What problems should I watch out for?
Original Submission
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 09 2015, @08:43PM
Transitioning to Linux is never change for the sake of change!
Why? It sounds like he doesnt *really* care. He has heard 'linux is better'. It is in many ways. But if what he has works why change it? I use both. But I do not use my computer to 'run windows' or 'run linux'. I use it to run programs... The OS is just the way to get where I want.
Over the past 10 years I've installed well over 100 programs and done countless tweaks and modifications to their defaults
It sounds like he is well invested into the windows ecosystem. You can change, but this seems to be something you want to fire up in a VM and try it out for awhile first. If someone was going the other way I would tell them the same thing.
Each of the OS's have their particular way of doing things. If you are not ready for that it can seem like the other one is 'broken'. Which is usually code word for 'this is not exactly how I learned it on the other OS'.
What do I mean by all of that? You are well invested into the linux way. Thats admirable. You defend it because it is what you know. But watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0 [youtube.com] It is about riding a bicycle. There are all sorts of little things you have learned to do that you 'just do'. He is going to have to re-learn all of that. It will seem awkward and broken for a long time. That is why I suggest a VM first. Just ripping the bandaid off when you are first learning is OK. I have been using it since linux fit on 2 floppy discs. But once you are in for 15+ years it takes a bit of relearning to get those 'muscle memory' things. Until that happens *everything* seems broken. Which can create something even worse. The person who is down on it because its 'junk'. Its not. Its just different.
It is why I asked. What does linux *DO* that windows does not? What are you after? Everything else will come quiet nicely from your requirements. For example I am heavily invested into PC games. That means windows. Linux does not fill that need very well (getting better but not there). I am also heavily invested into programming. Which means both linux AND windows. So my requirements are different than his and different than yours. What do you want your computer to do? Running linux or windows is rather low on my list of things I want my computer to *DO*.
(Score: 3, Informative) by martyb on Friday July 10 2015, @02:54AM
I actually do care. Not only have I heard that Linux is better, I have used it in the past. Heck, I installed RedHat back when a Celeron 400 was a not-too-shabby computer. Work-related stuff got me back on the windows treadmill. I'm trying to get back off!
I should clarify. I have installed well over 100 programs, but there's only a few that I use regularly: thunderbird, Hexchat, Pale Moon, VLC, and to a lesser extent: BabelMap, Xenu link sleuth, and a Sudoku puzzle. (Note: I'm not into any kind of gaming.)
What *nux does for me is make command scripting so much more consistent and less complicated. Windows is fine as far as it goes, but its escaping mechanisms are problematic. Further, I regularly use quite a number of userland tools like ls, sed, and awk but would love to have the whole cmdline ecosystem at my beck and call.
Lastly, I'd like to have a full build environment where I can easily take advantage of languages compilers, linkers, etc. from just installing something from some repository. When it comes to microsoft tools, the last thing I bought along those lines was Microsoft C 5.1 back in the early/mid 90's. Over the years, I've become less trusting of Microsoft, and see Windows 10 as just being a way to shoehorn people into using an appstore model. I am not interested in that idea, either.
So, no singular reason, but I've seen enough over the years, that I am now becoming willing to try moving to another, and open, OS.
Wit is intellect, dancing.