[Arm-netbook] OpenPOWER virtual coffee continues every Tuesday UTC 22:00

[Philip Hands]

Hi Alain,

Alain D D Williams <addw at phcomp.co.uk> writes:

> Time to upgrade my desktop to be able to run Brave (which does work with
> jitsi).

Isn't Brave a bit dodgy in parts too?  ISTR seeing someone talking about
forking it to remove some sort of tiresomeness.

If you fancy something completely different, I'm really enjoying using
Nyxt as my browser at present.  It's a bit rough around the edges,
mostly because it's using webkit2gtk which has some issues, but it's
got great potential -- it's written in common lisp, and it sort-of emacs
for the web (the author actually prefers vi key bindings, so if you're
not into emacs that's not necessarily a reason to turn your nose up):

  https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/

> I have run RedHat/CentOS for 25 years, but Centos 8 comes with Gnome
> 3 -- which I hate with a passion. I could install Xfce - but prefer Mate - so I
> am prob going to install Linux Mint - a child of Debian.

I knew it would happen eventually -- welcome to the clan :-)

Luke's wrong about Mint being exclusively Ubuntu based BTW, as you
probably already know, since you state that it's Debian based.

In fact it's both -- here's the Debian flavoured version:

  https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php

> My desktop has mirrored disks. I will break the mirror, install on one disk,
> preserve the current installation on the other, run up the current system, run
> the new one as a virtual machine, configure it, copy stuff over, then boot the
> new system native, test, add the old disk as a mirror to the new system (which
> current versions of LVM should let me do).

If I were you I wouldn't do the mirroring in LVM, but rather in md.  You
can create md RAID1s with a missing disk, and then add in a second disk
to the raid when you have it available, with no noticeable changes to the
configuration.

Look in mdadm's man page for:  simply give the word "missing" in place of a device name.

Not having used the mint installer, I don't know how easy it is to do
that at install time though.

BTW I'd normally make several partitions on both disks and then raid the
partitions, and add those raids as PVs into LVM. That allows one to move
things around, and migrate to bigger disks etc. more flexibly than when
just mirroring the whole disk, but it takes a bit more work to keep such
a setup in order.

> I have been putting this off for far too long :-(

I imagine it will be a little painful to teach your fingers to type the
debian versions of some sysadmin incantations, so I'm sure I'd also put
this off if I was migrating in the other direction.

Here's hoping that you have fun learning some new tricks.

Cheers, Phil.
-- 
|)|  Philip Hands  [+44 (0)20 8530 9560]  HANDS.COM Ltd.
|-|  http://www.hands.com/    http://ftp.uk.debian.org/
|(|  Hugo-Klemm-Strasse 34,   21075 Hamburg,    GERMANY