Linux gurus: I need some help

Factual Questions
1

I should be getting a new computer soon and will likely be installing linux on it (seperate boot from XP). Not sure what distro yet (more on this later).

Now, my current computer has Slackware 6 installed. I want to backup/copy my current linux files onto my new machine. I’d like some advice on the simplest way to do this. I’m not linuxly experienced, so I’m guessing that any advanced direct networking stuff or CD burning would be rather complicated. I’m thinking of just setting up FTP services on both systems (easy to do in linux) and xfering the files that way. Does this sound like the easiest way?

I’d also like some distro recommendations. The computer will come with XP installed, but I’ll likely PartitionMagic it and installed some version of linux. I’d like an easy to install version that doesn’t require me to manually configure everything. Also, it should feature good developper tools and web server services.

Thanks for any suggestions.

2

You should only copy the contents of /home. The other directories will be filled in by the new Linux distribution. You could just put your home directory on CDRs, but if it’s really big doing FTP might be a good idea. Be aware that FTP is a security hole, so you don’t want to be connected to the outside world while FTP is running. You might want to use SSH instead, which is secure, and doing scp to transfer the files once a SSH session has been established.

UnuMondo

3

FTP will work fine if you want to do that. If you’re going to have both machines on the same network it might be worth it to set up NFS, which will allow you to easily mount the remote filesystem on your new machine and copy the stuff even faster.

I will leave the distro reccomendations to the Holy Warriors.

[sub]Debian[/sub].

4

Good idea. You don’t need to establish an SSH session to do an scp though, it will establish its own session. SSH/SCP howto.. :slight_smile:

5

All good advice. One note: if your world is anything like mine, just /home won’t cut it. If you have enough space on the new hard disk, and you’ll need to get rid of the old hard disk, you can copy it all to a backup dir on the new drive to pull stuff out as needed.

Like others, I also recommend you ditch ftp and use ssh (and scp), as it’s much more secure. It’s likely you already have it installed.

If you have sshd on the new system (likely), and rsync on the old one (also likely), you can just type this on the old system to back up the whole hard drive (minus non-important stuff) to a /backup directory:



rsync -Cvaz -e ssh --progress --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/proc --exclude=/dev / root@192.168.1.163:/backup

of course you’ll want to replace “192.168.1.163” with the new system IP address.

6

See what kind of hardware that is coming with the new puter and cross reference that with the linux distros.

Mandrake and Redhat are both good out of the box for people that want a turn key distro.

Since you are running slack 6 , you may want to look into slack 9 , if you had no problems setting up that version.

Short ansewer is that each distro will have its own strengths and weaknesses , so a link that you may find helpful is

www.LinuxIso.org

Both for burnable iso’s and reviews of the various types , plus a helpful forum.

Declan

7

If you’re willing to crack the case simply put your old HDD in your new PC. Install everything on your new HDD then copy what you want off the old “Slave” drive.

8

I just went through installing Slackware 9,Mandrake 9.1 and Redhat 9 and more than anything the newer kernels make them all a snap to install. Slackware is rock solid as ever and Mandrake and Redhat have really made improvements on their RPM package management. You might want to check this site for any problems you might have. Of course,if you’re really brave and want a system that will launch space shuttles there’s always Debian:D

9

I like to use a combination of tar and ssh to get everything in one whack, rather than ftping a bunch of stuff seperately:



tar -C / -cf - home | ssh newmachine tar -C / -xvf -

The first half of this command (before the |) starts archiving up the contents of /home and spewing it out to standard output. You don’t see this output, because the pipe catches it and feeds it to an untar command on the new machine.

A more detailed dissection:
“-C /” means to use / as the current directory when starting the archive
“-cf -” means to create an archive, but instead of writing it to a file, write it to standard output.
"ssh newmachine " means to execute on the other machine
“-C /”, again to use / as the current directory
“-xvf -” means extract an archive, using standard input as the file, and the v makes it show all the filenames as it’s extracting them (to give you a feel for progress)

One or both of the “-C /” parts may not be necessary, but it never hurts to be explicit.

Read_Neck’s suggestion of putting the old hard drive in the new PC (even just temporarily) is a good one too. The tar commands will be really similar, except without the ssh bit. Let’s say you’ve got your second hard drive installed as /dev/hdb and /home is on partition /dev/hdb1. You could do this:



mkdir /tmp/oldstuff
mount /dev/hdb1 /tmp/oldstuff
ls /tmp/oldstuff/home    (to make sure you got the right partition)
tar -C /tmp/oldstuff -cf - home | tar -C / -xvf -

…and watch it plow through those files in no time.

10

RedHat 8 is quite usable, and is a big step up from the RedHat 7.xx days in terms of general usability. One minor gripe is that when installing it on my Compaq (boo, hiss), my USB keyboard wouldn’t work during the install process. I had to buy a PS/2 keyboard just to install the system.

That was the only hitch during an uneventful installation process. I think it was Sod’s Law* kicking me in the pants.

*“Something always goes wrong.”

A second gripe about RH 8 is the Bluecurve theme: It seems to have gobbled most of the other styles available to GNOME and KDE, and while I think the GNOME-KDE Grand Unification Process was generally a good thing, I wish they’d picked a slightly more mature-looking design for their flagship GUI.

But what the hell do I know. I’m switching between Blackbox, WindowMaker, FVWM2, and MWM (Motif Window Manager), only coming back to GNOME at odd intervals. Sometimes, I don’t even start X (emacs is my Lord and my Salvation, my One True Portal to the wonders of my machine!).

As for development tools, RH 8 comes satisfactorily endowed. I think every desktop (non-micro, non-rescue) distro contains the GNU binutils and gcc, so you’re covered there no matter what. RH 8 also includes odd frontends to gcc, like g77 (the GNU FORTRAN 77 compiler, as opposed to a FORTRAN-to-C translator) and a GNU Java system. (Interestingly, the Pascal frontend is not included. Pascal may not be my favorite programming language, but you might need/want it.) Perl and Python are available, as is Ruby (an amusing little upstart OO scripting language from Japan that’s made a few waves in the `executable pseudocode’ school of design simplicity and clarity).

If you want an IDE, Glade and KDevelop are both included. I don’t believe in them, myself (see above re. emacs :D), but they’re there.

I know RH 8 comes with Apache, but I’m not hosting anything off my desktop and I’m not particularly interested in doing so. Apache seems common enough, if nothing else.

You could do worse than RH 8, IMHO.