Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am putting my laptop back in it its own case and providing my thoughts on my first week of using PopOS on a desktop. Let’s get started!
Laptop History
I’ve said it before: my laptop is now nine years old, and it has no business still running, yet here it is. Trouble started when the power port broke, and I replaced it with a cheap knockoff. The BIOS refused to charge any batteries from it. I resigned to operating from the power cord on a permanent basis.
As I became more interested in using Linux as my daily driver, I saw no harm in installing to a large, external USB 3 SSD. It actually performed better than the internal hard disk. The only downside was one more cable, and that seemed like nothing with the power cord, and I even opted for a second monitor and a separate keyboard/mouse.
Things started turning around when I got a hold of a genuine power port. Installation was a success, but shortly afterward, I accidentally nuked my Windows drive during an unrelated project. Much later, I swapped out the wiped hard disk for a more modern SSD during an emergency teardown in preparation for this week’s simple, but monumental project.
dd if=/dev/sdd of=/dev/sda –status=progress
The dd command is easily the single most inherently dangerous command I know. As such, I insisted on backing up my home directory in case I had another “nuclear accident.” I developed a series of prerequisites, such as getting an NFS share working as I expected with login credentials of one sort or another. I researched that for a while, but made not quite enough progress in that department to justify continued intense focus.
The typical go-to terminal program for do-it-yourself automatic backups is rsync. I would have used cp, as I’m more familiar with it, but rsync has a number of improvements. It’s supposed to be faster, and it intelligently ignores files already in the target directory. It also has an overwhelming number of additional options I couldn’t begin to cover.
Once I had a copy safely stored on network storage, I had rsync double check it, and I loaded up my PopOS install media –also on a USB 3– to prepare for the final copy action. The BIOS kept loading back to my main install, but instead of arguing with the BIOS, I just unplugged the wrong drive until it was strictly needed.
Both my target and my receiving drive are 1 terabyte a piece, but there’s a little room for variation in the specs. As a final check, I used lsblk –bytes to examine the exact size, and I had a relatively tiny difference in size leaning in my favor. As is becoming my custom for dangerous commands with elevated permissions, I only prefixed it with sudo after checking and double checking the command after entering it. I REALLY don’t like commands where a single character off could be a valid command I do not want to run, especially when I have hard drive designations /dev/sdd and /dev/sdb at the same time.
I only triple checked before executing the critical command. I should have quadruple checked, but everything was in place. I had dd report its progress so I could estimate its time til completion, and it turned out to about 6 hours. I was not there for when it finished, but it booted up just fine first try. My laptop is now a normal laptop again.
PopOS Meltdown and Recovery
PopOS gave me a bit of a scare this week. I customized it by installing KDE, but it started acting really weird when I was trying to play a game with my sister. The trouble started after an update. Discord and Firefox were going on the fritz, sometimes spazzing out two or three times a minute per use. Rebooting didn’t work. Loading up GNOME didn’t work. I had to put it away over Sabbath, and when I upgraded packages again, the issues stopped immediately. I am very thankful to the teams who provided a quick turn around time for whatever bug was making things unusable.
Final Question
I have been looking forward to finishing this milestone for a really long time. I feel like a soft chapter in my hobby here has come to an end. Which of my long-term projects should I return to next?