I have a Hewlett Packard Vectra, 1GHZ, 500 Megs ram, Nvidia Card, running Suse 11.0. I am buying an IBM Thinkcentre, 2 GHZ, 1 Gig ram. I would like to take my 80 gig Hard drive, nvidia card and swap it from the old machine to the new one. Am I going to suffer issues w/ this swap, for example, should I just swap & reinstall a clean version of the os, or will it work out ok?
Thanks for your time.
There most certainly will be issues, as you suspect.
If it were me, I would do fresh install with the dvd and would keep /home as is.
Though if you have the dvd, it is possible to work thru and get your existing install working.
What will happen is that when you boot from the old drive in the new machine, the kernel modules now built into your initrd will not be what is needed to support the new machine’s chipset (e.g., the disk controller) and the boot will fail.
Now, this can all be worked out by hand using the Rescue System (or a Live-CD), but you really need to know what you’re doing under the hood - a fair amount of command-line work will be required. If you’re asking, then probably this isn’t the route for you.
A clean install on the new machine is probably preferable. However, you could try an Upgrade from the DVD; IIRC it will still do hardware detection and, for the kernel installation, set up a new initrd, as well as for the other hardware components (like sound).
I advice to follow the comment of caf4926. In an old SDB article (I’m no more able to find it again) I found the command to copy the hold /home into the new PC mantaining the owner.
Mount the old HD on the new machine, for example in /mnt/OLD/home
the issue the command:
cd /mnt/OLD/home/myuser
tar --numeric-owner -cpf - . | ( cd /home/myuser && tar xpvf - )
Ok, thanks people. I appreciate your input & will let you know how things work out.
Ok, I have transfered all my hardware to new machine. Linux boots up and will allow me to login in text mode. How can I switch to a GUI from here? Also, I tried to both upgrade and/or repair the installation but nothing has changed, still in text mode.
Thanks for your time.
This is probably a graphics issue
You could make vesa your driver to get a GUI and then install proper
From the boot menu, clear any existing boot arguments - type 3 in the boot line to get runlevel 3 - login as root
type
sax2 -r -m 0=vesa
reboot
this should enable a display using vesa