Hardware Refresh, next steps

Hardware Refresh, next steps

kid2 recovery

kid2 didn't want to boot anymore (black screen) so I fiddled a little bit with HDD cabling until I could get into the BIOS setup.  The case still has 2GB PC2-6400 RAM (2x512Mb unbranded + 1x1GB Kingston with cooler).  One DIMM slot is still free so maybe I could add some more RAM in there.  This is a Gigabyte motherboard and I should still have the manual lying around somewhere.

After the fiddling, I tried booting the Vista partition (doesn't work, I knew that already) then the Vista recovery partition (did work but I cancelled the recovery as I want to backup data from the Windows partition first).

So I booted Xubuntu and did a local backup of the /windows/Users using tar --exclude .*<lots of unwanted stuff>.  The backup is too big for my biggest SD card so I need to put the PC back on the network somehow in order to transfer this.

kid3 backups

The full backup didn't complete last night due to /windows not being mounted.  The Linux partition was backed up though.  This results in a Partial full backup in backuppc.  Not good enough (even though there is currently no data on the Windows side).  I configured the NTFS partitions and permanently mounted the main one (that contains /windows/Users) then rescheduled the full backup for the next night.

kid3 Windows setup

I booted  Vista and logged in as the ACER (administrator) account with the password I had setup on the first boot.  Configured the network, refreshed Windows Defender, created 5 non-administrator accounts for the family (no passwords at this point).  My intention is to restore the Windows data from kid2 here before cleaning up kid2 and restoring Vista on kid2 (which likely will destroy that data).  I know I, for one, still have data on there and some family members have used kid2 in the past too, maybe under Vista.

kid3 Lubuntu setup

Did fiddle a little bit with a PCmanfm "action" or "custom command" so that the Upload2Flickr right-click will not start multiple instances when uploading several photos in one go.  This only involved using %F instead of %f but the fun part was to find where this *.desktop file was.
I urgently needed to work on *.chopro files and my scripts weren't working right anymore (some because of missing dependencies but then still some other problems including the need to recompile that old "chord" program.  I still had the necessary source package but I finally found out that a newer version had been developed and released as GPL and seems to be freshy maintained (under the name Chordii or chordii) so I just installed that from the repositories and tweaked my chordview script a little bit accordingly.  That worked fine.  I installed Libreoffice too to handle the lyrics output and found out that the recode latin1-utf8 seems to be useless now so I removed the call to recode.
Finally I had very little time left to test photo editing but I managed to edit and export 10 photos with a pretty good experience under Darktable 2.0.  The Lighttable is pretty fast when changing collections and scrolling (probably thanks to the additional RAM + the new cache in DT 2.0).  Exporting is still slowish but that's when it's OK to take a break from the editing so no problem.