Whats the consensus on a Mobo swap while saving an Ubuntu install

I have an Ubuntu install that I have exactly the way I want it.

Will swapping the Mobo only; hose the install?

If so is there a way to save everything not just my settings? I have my personnel stuff backed up.

You could make an Image of your current drive setup,, but changing MB shouldn't be a problem, wasn't with one of my ubuntu installations, as when it boots up usually just finds all the needed drivers, ect.

Just use the HD and let it do it's thing. It will load up just as you expect. Nothing special or hard. It has everything it needs to allow hardware swaps. The only zinger would be tweaking specific hardware. i.e- wireless, sound and video cards. If this is all the same, it should go rather smooth.

I swap out between my Intel and my wife's AMD all the time. I even took my drive along on vacation and it worked sweetly on a totally ancient Compaq setup. Minus me dd'ing over to an IDE drive.

The only thing you might encounter is unsupported hardware.

Oh thats great...Thanks JS and Ewolf.. I'll make sure the Mobo is on Ubuntu's tested list.

I went to use an 8800GT and the only way to get it to work with the old Mobo was to do a Firmware to make it a Gen1 (as in 1.0 as opposed to Pcie 2.0)

Even though its reversible seemed like a Pita.

Decided it was time to upgrade.

I'll boot it up first with the old GPU and everything else. Then work on the new GPU after.

Most boards that are released a few months before the distro release should work alright. I moved to 7.10 due to a quirk with the legacy USB on my DS3L. :/
I am not wanting to use 8.04 just yet. It does not like 2 of my mp3 players. There is a work around, but this current works like I want it to. I got it humming like a hornets nest.

You know you could reuse your home folder and install partitions right? IF you do a full reinstall... That dd command is really sweet.

dfonda said:

I have an Ubuntu install that I have exactly the way I want it.

Will swapping the Mobo only; hose the install?

If so is there a way to save everything not just my settings? I have my personnel stuff backed up.

Click to expand...

I've successfully migrated a few installs to different systems...and I've had a couple get hosed.

It's a crap-shoot.

If you're running 6.06 or 7.04 or 7.10 then you might find 8.04 a bit more polished...and a bit more bloated.

When I upgraded my old Athlon XP rigs motherboard to a 2004 Gigabyte 7N400 Pro2 Ubuntu 7.04 got completely screwed up and needed a reinstall.

Thanks for the extra input.

To keep from using a too new Mobo. I'll take my Asus P5B Deluxe and use that, and use the new modern Mobo on the XP rig.

Is the cpu the same in both cases?

If not you can have problems... well, especially in Gentoo... maybe not in Ubuntu.

MRD said:

Is the cpu the same in both cases?

If not you can have problems... well, especially in Gentoo... maybe not in Ubuntu.

Click to expand...

I was going to a Quad but after I made sure everything was working. Its not really necessary. I needed the Mobo to run a 8800GT for folding. I probably will not run the CPU client anymore.

Thats a question in itself...upgrading CPU's any problem? After the Mobo checks out OK?

Or is it a concern in any circumstances?

If the new cpu is a superset of the instruction set of the old cpu, you're fine.

i.e. you can take an athlon-tbird out and put an athlon-xp in, but not vice versa (the tbird lacks sse which will cause apps optimized for an xp with the -march build option to die).

Sometime it will work ok going down if the distro doesn't take advantage of cpu featuers. For example, if you build an OS for i386 and run it on a c2 duo, it'll run fine. If you downgrade to an athlon xp, it'll still run fine, as both can use the i386 instruction set.

Gentoo tends to be pickier about these things because when you set up your make.conf, you build for a certain arch. I use -march=athlon-xp for an athlon xp, -march=nocona for a c2d, -march=pentium3 for a p3, etc. This causes gcc to use instructions in these chips that may not be in all x86 chips. If the binaries are all precompiled, they may not make use of the added instruction sets. Some programs can fork code and just make a larger executable that can use optimizations when available (run time cpu detection). Examples are mplayer and foldingathome.

One thing that will be annoying if you switch the mb is that udev will now assign your adapter the designation eth1, as it will recognize that eth0 is associated with the mac address on your old mb. The way to fix this is to delete the udev rule that assigns eth0 to a certain mac address, then shut down, swap motherboards, and restart, and it will correctly give you eth0.

In gentoo, this is in /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules (the line to remove will be obvious). Just delete it. It is probably somewhere similar in ubuntu. The line will have your mac address.

If you're upgrading from a dual core to a quad, and the dual core was properly recognized in:
then your kernel is already SMP 'aware'. If not, you could browse/search Synaptic for installation of the SMP kernel and any headers needed to compile it.

My two cents: Went from a gb p965 with a e6600 to a p5k with a q9300 and no problems here. 8.04 install

I just upgraded kernels on an ubuntu 8.x system, and it freaked on the nvidia drivers. I could not make them work. Finally just built them myself and manually wrote the xorg.conf and now it's working, but the automated stuff failed completely.

MRD said:

I just upgraded kernels on an ubuntu 8.x system, and it freaked on the nvidia drivers. I could not make them work. Finally just built them myself and manually wrote the xorg.conf and now it's working, but the automated stuff failed completely.

Click to expand...

Had a similar issue until I used the beta drivers. I couldnt get their regular drivers to work so I went with beta

I can't figure out the Ubuntu module system either (i.e. how you get modules to autoload). Even after I got an nvidia module that would load, it still wouldn't work right. I used scp and just grabbed an xorg.conf from a Gentoo box, tweaked it a bit, and then it worked. Annoyingly, dkpg-reconfigure generated the most worthless xorg.conf that wouldn't even start, had no mention of a video driver, no screen resolutions, nothing.

Gentoo is so much easier. I guess that's cause I understnd it and use it, so working in a foreign environment like Ubuntu is harder for me. In the end though, even in Ubuntu, I find that falling back on my Gentoo-ish lower level tactics often works.

The kernel system was horribly confusing. There are like 800 kernels you can download, different versions, purposes, arches... and they have things like x86 generic, and i386... WTF? An x86 generic IS i386, that's the only instruction set supported by all (generic) x86 cpus. Makes no sense. Then there seemed to be this k7 kernelpackage... (it's an athlon xp), so I downloaded that, but it didn't seem to change the kernel, and it required the generic kernel package. That made no sense to me either.

I'll stick with Gentoo. I like to really see what's going on.

ihrsetrdr said:

If you're upgrading from a dual core to a quad, and the dual core was properly recognized in:

Code:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

then your kernel is already SMP 'aware'. If not, you could browse/search Synaptic for installation of the SMP kernel and any headers needed to compile it.

Click to expand...

Yup

My two cents: Went from a gb p965 with a e6600 to a p5k with a q9300 and no problems here. 8.04 install

Click to expand...

Looks like I should be fine. Going from an e6600 to a Q6600.