Ubuntu 17.10

Last month I upgraded kid3 & run12l.  No issue, even got the latest Darktable etc so I didn't need to add any ppa so far.  Yesterday I also upgraded base so all OK for now.  I took a look inside (this is a Packard Bell B2501 BE).  Still spare room for disks (both SATA-several connectors free and one free IDE connector) and cards (no extension cards on the motherboard, using the on-board audio and video circuits).  There are 2 PCI slots and at least two PCIe slots (1x and longer).  There's also only 1 DIMM slot used and thus the second one is free.  Looks like this required DIMM DDR2 800.  Iirc the CPU is an E2200.  There's an unused HDD in that box, with only Linux partitions (/ swap /home probably) and it's about 200GB.  It still works (I connected it temporarily for testing) and seems to have data from 2014.  I think /home is empty though so nothing to save from there.  Could probably be used as recovery boot in case of failure of the main SATA HDD.

I ordered a PCIe 4-port USB3 card to install in this box in order to speed up the archives so I can start rolling out with my off-site backups.  I also bought a Maxtor M3 2Tb USB3 external hard disk (at Black Friday prices, 63€) but I still have to pick that up.

I might buy a used monitor screen to replace the one used by kid3 so I can move that one to base in order to troubleshoot a boot failure that I had when the IDE drive was connected (seen as /dev/sda).

Hardware Refresh

Bought a new hardware as I was more and more pissed off by the slow kid2 when doing photo editing/retouching and stuff.  Too little RAM is my diagnostic, the processor doesn't seem to be the cause (except when heavy stuff is going on like exporting from Darktable).
So I bought a very cheap tower ready to go: ACER Aspire 3641-500Mb HDD-4Gb RAM-5.1 Soundcard-Graphics with Digital and Analog outputs-some room for growth (not RAM unfortunately, 4Gb seems to be the max).

Installed Lubuntu 15.10 yesterday.  Notes to self:

• use makeusb not usb-creator to create the boot SD (at least with 15.10).  Others are buggy and won't boot
• don't think you'll need the 32bit image when your CPU is Intel.  You still want the AMD64 architecture unless the PC is really old and has less than 2Gb RAM.
• don't use the "reinstall" menu in the lubuntu installer.  It just doesn't work and fails silently, then requests you to reboot on an incompletely installed OS
• buy a Wifi dongle if you don't have a cat5 cable available at some convenient place (I did the install/upgrade with the tower on the floor and the monitor and keyboad on a chair).  Action point taken, I ordered a cheap one from China today.
• the PC came with a working Vista partition (+ recovery partition I think) + a "VIDEOS" empty NTFS partition.  I left the Vista Home Edition Premium on the HDD and another NTFS partition for data.  I then created a Logical partition and added the Linux Root and Swap inside that.  This is a 500Gb disk partitioned approximatively like this (from memory, probably incomplete as the total is not right).
• ? Windows Recovery/Reset partition
• 213 NTFS Windows Vista boot
• 108 NTFS Data
• 108 Linux root
• 4 Linux Swap
• Installed Darktable directly from the ppa in order to get 2.0 not the 1.6 from the distro
• Added the new host (kid3) to backuppc host list -- will need to tweak that configuration to make it work too.  And add some ssh configuration too I guess.

My plan is to vgexport/vgimport the large SATA disk from kid2 (and come  back to a smaller /home disk on kid2).  Once working fine on kid3 I'll see if I can restore the Windows stuff on kid2 to make it a backup/alternate office PC maybe.