Dell running XP experiencing harddrive failure in the last few months I had
to come up with a solution to consolidate computers. Fortunately I now have
my laptop, so I didn't need the desktop, but it made it hard for the
non-laptop owners in the family (e.g. brothers + mom) to do anything on the
computer. Fortunately I had a copy of Gutsy Gibbon laying around and a spare
20 gig hard drive that I mooched from our high school IT department.
The installation went pretty smoothly, I set up a separate partition for
/home/, everything else on the primary partition. Then came the process of
recovering data from the other 2 drives. The G3 was fairly easy since it
still booted up (usually), so I turned on FTP file sharing. Note: the ftp
server on OS X 10.3 SUCKS. So I turned to Samba and dumped everything onto
the Ubuntu machine that way (I realise that sharing information between 2
non-Windows machines with a M$ protocol is made of fail, but it worked). The
Dell's old harddrive was a little harder since my external drive enclosure
is for 2.5" drives. I ended up turning it off, unplugging the CD drive,
plugging in the old harddrive and turning it back on. I mounted it, and
copied everything over into everyone's new home folders. This was PAINFULLY
slow from GNOME so I ended up switching to tty1 and doing it from the
terminal.
This brought me to the step of importing all mom's mail settings from
Mail.app into Thunderbird. This was fairly easy at first, copied over the
settings by hand and found an apple script to export Address Book entries to
.csv format. I started thunderbird again just to double check, sent out a
test email, everything was working fine. The next day Mom sent me an email saying that for some reason NEITHER computer could get incoming mail, but that she could still send mail out fine, and asked if I thought the new computer had broken it. I couldn't think of how it would have, but at least the problem made some sense since she uses our ISP for outgoing mail and her account with the college for incoming mail, but the college webmail was working fine, so obviously their servers were still up and running. I emailed both a friend at the college who uses linux, and the college IT desk, and evidently they recently designed to enforce the use of SSL to connect to their IMAP server. Problem solved. Also, since Linux has better support for Windows media formats then OS X does, mom was really psyched to be able to listen to her VPR classical internet radio with Rhythmbox. Score another one for Linux :D I also copied over her background image from the Mac, and she really likes the scroll wheel over the iMac's puck mouse. Not too fond of the right click button yet, but I think she'll adapt.
Outstanding tasks:
- editing device permissions to make digital cameras, TI graphing
calculators, and iPods usable without administrative privileges. - netatalk recognizes our Apple Laserwriter 320, which is currently hooked
up to the house LAN via an AsanteTalk gadget, but won't actually print
things to it. - Samba network browsing is still touchy.
help on any of these would be useful if someone reading this is familiar.
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