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\u2019s get started!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s simple, but monumental project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The dd<\/strong> 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 \u201cnuclear accident.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The typical go-to terminal program for do-it-yourself automatic backups is rsync<\/strong>. I would have used cp<\/strong>, as I\u2019m more familiar with it, but rsync<\/strong> has a number of improvements. It\u2019s 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\u2019t begin to cover.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once I had a copy safely stored on network storage, I had rsync<\/strong> double check it, and I loaded up my PopOS install media \u2013also on a USB 3\u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Both my target and my receiving drive are 1 terabyte a piece, but there\u2019s a little room for variation in the specs. As a final check, I used lsblk –bytes<\/strong> 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\u2019t 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<\/strong> and \/dev\/sdb<\/strong> at the same time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t work. Loading up GNOME didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019s get started! Laptop History I\u2019ve said it before: my laptop is now nine years old, and it has … <\/p>\nPopOS Meltdown and Recovery<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Final Question<\/h2>\n\n\n\n