I've just completed the first (or perhaps second?) stage of migrating from two very old computers to two rather newer ones. Here are the dramatis personae:

Bigboy: my ancient but much loved Lenovo tower. This is currently my main machine. I've already had to change its hard drive, and even so it's still showing its age. It won't run any Slackware kernels later than about 6.4, and building from source a kernel that will actually run has been a burden. I think it's time to move on.

Littleboy: a tiny Samsung laptop that has such weird and obsolete graphics (Via Chrome) that it will not run even the very accommodating antiX any later than antiX-19! I have been using this for a couple of years now as a dump server with the help of rsync scripts written for me by some of my friends here.

Newboy: A largeish Dell laptop which I bought off @beachboy2 last year. I like it a lot. It is a bit bulky but it has a proper keyboard with a lovely action and not too much duplication of function (Littleboy has a cramped keyboard with lots of multifunction keys). I plan to make this my main computer, eventually replacing Bigboy. It runs antiX-26 (a replacement for Beachboy's original Peppermint) and a skeletal version of Slackware-current.

Oldboy: a replacement for Littleboy. This is a weirdly elegant Sony Vaio all-in-1. I found it in the street where someone had dumped it and fell in love with it. It was running Windows Vista, believe it or not. It now runs antiX-26. This will be my new dump server replacing Littleboy, which I shall scrap eventually (you can recycle old laptops at my local library).

Today I was able to carry out my first Slackware-15 dump from Bigboy to Oldboy. It was quite tricky setting up the authentication keys but I finally managed it. I update and dump Slackware once a month (out of AntiX-23 which also runs on Bigboy) and this was the April dump. From now on, all monthly dumps of Slackware-15 will be onto this server.

I have already carried out two successive weekly dumps of the Bigboy data directory (which is shared between Slackware and Antix and accessible from both at /home/data). So for these dumps, no more Mr Littleboy!

The next dump cycle to set up will be that of antiX-26 on Newboy onto Oldboy. I haven't done a dump of this yet but I plan to do them weekly. That will have to be done out of Slackware-current. And finally there will be a monthly dump of Slackware-current on Newboy out of antiX-26.

Brothers, we're on our way!

Hi,

Hazel, I can understand your position. My migrations and maintenance take a lot of my time. I feel for your situation to migrate to new hardware. One reason that I personally use Slackware64 for my machines. Microsoft has been a major block at times but I can overcome that with a little more work. I just moved to some new Dell Laptops. What an experience! I have been using my Dell XPS L702X since 2012, it still functions but I wanted a new unit to get better graphics and display with speed. Sadly, I had to go with a 15" Dell XPS.

Sure it is smaller and lighter for my lap desk and the keyboard takes some getting used too. The old XPS had a full keyboard and fit my big hands perfectly.

Hope your migration goes smoothly.

The main problem so far has been setting up the keys for dumping. The data dump is done in my name, but all the other dumps are run as root and I was not able to copy over root's public key on Bigboy to Oldboy using ssh-copy-id, because the final password check always failed. I suspect it's a PAM thing; remote root logins are probably not allowed by the system. So I had to use a pendrive. At least I know now how to do that.

The next job will be to do the same thing for the two systems on Newboy, so that I can use them to dump each other.

Rsync migration vs Backup restore ...

I prefer a backup restore in a new install to test/check/found needed files ...

I hope everything goes well.

rsync isn't being used for the migration, only for the regular backups that used to go to Littleboy but now need to be diverted to Oldboy.

Newboy has its own fresh AntiX-26 installed from scratch, so I don't need to migrate over the old AntiX-23, and the Slackware will also be new. I'm constructing it in the same way as I constructed my personalised Slackware-15, only using -current. I couldn't do that before because the constant updating would have taken more monthly downloads than I'm allowed on my home scheme, but my church now provides free wifi so I'm using that. One of the advantages of switching to a laptop.

I suspect that by the time I've finished building Slackware up, it won't be -current any more, it'll be Slackware 15.1!

The only thing that will actually have to be migrated is the data partition. Time enough to do that when everything else is done.

Update: My dumps are fully migrated. I can now dump each of the systems on Newboy onto Oldboy. Littleboy has been retired.

Unlike Slackware-15 on Bigboy, which I update and dump once a month, Slackware-current needs a weekly dump. That wasn't the original plan, but I think it is necessary -- especially now, when I am adding new packages all the time. When (if?) the new Slackware release drops and I switch to it, I can go back to monthly dumps.

What I have not got working yet is Slackware wifi. For the time being, I am doing my weekly Slackware updates in church by chrooting over from AntiX, and my weekly AntiX dump to Oldboy using an ethernet cable.

Sounds complicated - I just back up to external disks.

I need something to fill my time . And it's cheaper than buying a big external drive. I did buy Newboy but that cost can be written off; I needed a new computer anyway because Bigboy is so long in the tooth. And Oldboy came for free.

A huge step forward! Today I got wifi working in Slackware-current on Newboy for the first time. What has apparently been holding me back is that there are two devices associated with that wifi card: wlan1 and something called p2p_dev_wlan1 (any explanations would be welcome). The latter was somehow muscling in ahead of wlan1 and preventing it from functioning. I had to add p2p_disabled=1 to my wpa_supplicant.conf file to deactivate it.

The next thing I need to learn is how to use nmcli to set up permanent "connections" for my home router and the church router so that I can call up the appropriate one as required.

Hope that helps.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...etwork-manager
EDITED: in FWIW comment 1.

The only thing I can say is I "hate" network-manager and I don't use it. All manually or scripts.

So the next thing was to get a GUI up and running. Once again I set myself a challenge: this Slackware will run wayland, not X. I know wayland is controversial, a bit like systemd, but I like what I have read about the logic of it. It feels cleaner than X. And most of the arguments about what it can't do deal with things that I don't want to do anyway. I want a workhorse, not a racehorse.

I have a small experimental wayland system running on Slackware-15 on Bigboy and I copied over my personal config files from that, but it was set up on a system that already ran X. Starting from scratch is a bit more tricky. I knew that I would need a compositor (I decided to use labwc again because I already know a little bit about it), plus mesa for the graphics, evdev and libinput for the trackpad, and seatd to launch it. And of course all their dependencies. I have become pretty good at dependency tracking . An Arch wiki article suggested adding a few other things like libdisplay-info (I've no idea what that does) and checking that seatd-launch runs suid and that my user is a member of the video group.

Even so first launch was a failure. Seatd launched, printed an incomprehensible string and terminated. So I tried again, this time with standard error redirected into a file. Et voila, a nice string of legible error messages, all concerned with evdev and keyboard mapping. I do love the way Linux does error reporting! It practically does all the work for you. Yesterday after some DDG work, I decided that what I needed was xkeyboard-config. Funnily enough I don't have that particular package installed on Bigboy's Slackware, but the files labwc looks for were probably installed on that system by some other part of X.

Anyway, I installed xkeyboard-config on the laptop at 7.00 this morning and that did the trick. A dull black graphical screen now comes up when I launch labwc. No wallpaper, no taskbar, but there is a menu and I was able to launch Firefox. From now on it's just a matter of accumulating more furniture.

And now I have Xwayland and can run legacy X apps alongside native wayland ones. labwc launches it automatically (as I already knew from my experimental wayland system on Bigboy) but on Newboy it kept crashing and dumping core. Error messages suggested that it needed xkbcomp and that turned out to be the only thing it needed.

The weekly dumping cycle is quite automated now.

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