Hello,

I'm getting a new laptop, but keeping the old hard drive (I'd recently replaced it, so it's brand new and shiny). The old laptop was a Dell, the new one will probably be a Samsung. My question is: will I have to reinstall linux?

I use Debian Etch, and I'd just gotten all the programs and configurations just the way I liked them, so I'd really rather not have to reinstall. Can I just reconfigure for the new machine?

Second question: are there some laptops that run linux better than others? I keep hearing about all these laptops that are supposedly super-compatible with Vista, which implies that different machines are more suited to different OSes. Are some laptops more Debian friendly than others?

Any help would be appreciated,

Thanks

At least you can try booting. And you can take backups from the drive, and then drop them back when you've reinstalled if you need to take that path. Backing up your home directory backs up many user settings (they're stored under /home/username/.something/), so programs and system-wide configurations are the only thing you'll need to hunt down. They're often just text config files so back them up, and when you put them back, you're fine again. They're not after all so numerous that you couldn't find and back them up in a day (or less, depending on how wide and tweaked your system actually is).

But you can try and see if it just worked. The most tricky bit is if the cpu family and alike change; your kernel is compiled for a specific kind of hardware, and it will only run on hardware it has "support" built for. But if you're using a stock kernel, chances are it supports wider range of hardware than you need, and it can boot on different hardware too (that's why they can put a generic kernel on a distribution install disc and it works when you install the thing, even though the kernel packager didn't know what machine you're going to use).

You may have to check your bootloader configuration (LILO or GRUB) too, but not necessarily as you're using your old disk.

I would try to boot and if it doesn't work out, then just back up..it's a good habit to have a separate /home partition, because in situations like this you could just copy system-wide configs to that partition, not format it, and after a reinstall ask your package manager to get the apps back (doesn't take long these days, one command), then copy the system-wide config files back and because your /home was not formatted, user-specific configurations were ok already.

I have installed the same hdd running Fedora Core 6 in three different desktop computers and it always booted to the login screen. I'm writing this from the computer with that hdd that has been upgraded from FC6 to F7 now.

Plug it in and give it a try!

First off, make sure the hard drive will fit. Older laptops used the 44 wire parallel IDE interface, while some newer laptops use SATA interface.

Second, Debian 4.0 will boot up, but there will certainly be some issues. Probably X won't work. It will fail and ask if you want to see the error messages. Look at the error messages to figure out what BusID the new laptop's graphics chip is assigned to. Change this in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. While you're at it, you may need to change the Driver (if you're not sure what to change it to, change it to the generic "vesa" driver).

Also, sound probably won't be working. Run "alsaconf" to fix that.

Finally, networking will probably be funny, unless you're using some sort of USB or cardbus NIC (which you move over to the new laptop). Assuming you use integrated networking hardware, then you'll have to fix that.

I'm not familiar with wireless networking, but I know that with wired networking, you will at a minimum have to deal with udev deciding to assign the new wired NIC a new device name. For example, the current NIC might be assigned the device name eth0 while the new NIC will be assigned the device name eth1. One way to fix this problem is to edit the udev rules to change the device name to eth0. If you're using wired networking, I'll provide more detailed instructions on how to fix this udev stuff.

Thanks for all your help!

I did just plug it in and try, and it mostly worked. I had to change the root device from /dev/hdc1 to /dev/hda1, but that was fairly trivial. I changed the device names in /etc/fstab as well (the cd drive is now /dev/hdc1 and the hard drive /dev/hda1). Is there anywhere else I need to change this information?

Sound and X system worked right away, though I've lost my ability to switch to a cyrillic keyboard. All in all, I'm sure there's nothing I can't figure out with some time and googling.

Thanks again!