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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: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Thursday July 09 2015, @09:30PM
Well, some corrections: systemd was well in the works and released (2011) before Snowden 2013.
Being opensource, its been gone over with a fine tooth comb by its detractors and enemies, and nobody has found anything nefarious, and actually very little in the way of crappy code.
It was not designed for Joe user, and renders no benefits to joe user. It is not significantly faster, not significantly more secure, not smaller, and not significantly easier to use. Its just different, which imposes a short learning curve, which sysvInit did also.
Having said that, its not significantly worse in any of those categories either. But it does offend the sensibilities of a lot of people, my self included.
All I'm saying is it has not caused me any problems. I'm not a fan of it. My distro (Opensuse) is very careful in its implementation of it such that I have never been inconvenienced by it for longer than it takes to google an answer.
It was designed for big server farm operators and massive virtual machine clouds. It was not built for Joe user.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by NCommander on Friday July 10 2015, @06:40AM
It doesn't have to be backdoored if the design itself is completely idiotic. Everything in systemd is built around connecting to journald, and requiring code level callbacks to sd_notify ti allow the thing to work as adversed. I'm not a big fan of journald, but it would chaft me at all if the damn thing was useful, it can only long stdout, so with a lot of daemons which use stderr (which has been standard practice for 30+ years of UNIX). Due to replacing LDAP with Hesiod on our backend, SSH started hanging on our one CentOS node, and it proved impossible to get useful debug information out of systemd; I ended up just spawning another sshd instance, and getting debug output that way.
Beyond the stderr idioticy, systemd allows malformed unit files, and will not fail (or warn) if theres a stanza it doesn't recongize. This allows a typo to have serious security issues that could easily be missed in code review and such. I could probably find more to hate but that's just what I ran into today.
Still always moving
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 10 2015, @10:47PM
It was not designed for Joe user, and renders no benefits to joe user. It is not significantly faster, not significantly more secure, not smaller, and not significantly easier to use. Its just different
Ah I see you work in marketing.