I had an old PC act up recently...

Post #434,148 by Another Scott 5/24/20 11:07:27 AM 5/24/20 11:07:27 AM Reply	I had an old PC act up recently... Was trying to move from XP to 7 to 10 on a PC with 3 PCI slots. Lots of weird issues trying to update things. Turned out it was the video card. If you've tried everything else and want to try a hail Mary, that might be one final route. (I assume you've checked the motherboard for things like swollen capacitors with brown junk leaking out the tops already.) Good luck! Cheers, Scott.
Post #434,149 by drook 5/24/20 1:16:38 PM 5/24/20 1:22:16 PM Reply	PS/2 keyboard works, but ... I can't find an old (not-USB) mouse, so I'm looking for keyboard shortcuts. And it's not letting me switch to alternative terminals. Eg: ctrl-alt-F2. Nor is there an option for selecting boot mode. [edit] Shortcut worked. Currently running dpkg reconfigure. Fingers crossed. -- Drew Edited by drook May 24, 2020, 01:22:16 PM EDT Expand All History
Post #434,151 by pwhysall 5/24/20 5:20:12 PM 5/24/20 5:20:12 PM Reply	Also... ...consider a P2V transition. You can then experiment to your heart's content with multiple copies, run it on much faster compute and storage, etc.
Post #434,152 by drook 5/24/20 5:27:41 PM 5/24/20 5:27:41 PM Reply	Maybe once I drop the coin on a new box I've been using work laptops for the last decade. The one I'm recovering now is the last desktop system I've used, and my current laptop is Windows. -- Drew
Post #434,159 by crazy 5/25/20 8:08:46 AM 5/25/20 8:08:46 AM Reply	This^^^^ The minute you start spinning up virtual instances on absolutely standard hardware that the drivers are always just there for since the OS writers have been pairing it up for years, yeah hell of a run on, your life will be changed. seriously, administration becomes so damn easy as compared to trying to match drivers and hardware and everything else that comes into play. then add into the fact that you can bring them up and drop them down in a minute or two and you'll have a standardized fresh play space. You can do anything for a short while with absolutely no harm to anything else possible. You're not an admin of a system because you want to be, you are because you have to be. You're trying to achieve a goal of an application. The system is just baggage. Go virtual and all that time will be returned to you. or at least new time won't be stolen.
Post #434,160 by drook 5/25/20 9:38:47 AM 5/25/20 9:38:47 AM Reply	Ok, so how? Two questions: 1) What's the host system and how often does that update? 2) Is it possible to turn my current live system into an instance on the current drive? -- Drew
Post #434,161 by crazy 5/25/20 12:15:02 PM 5/25/20 12:15:02 PM Reply	It's been years for me since I've done this stuff So while I can recount experience with tools in those days it would be useless to you. So I can give you some general direction and manage expectations, but Peter or someone else would have to give you specifics. I just know I was doing it for the preceding 10 years with ever increasing expectations that s*** worked and worked well. It was touch and go in the beginning and then it matured about 5 years and then it was a matter of just choosing the cheapest implementation. And there were always free options for home users.
Post #434,162 by crazy 5/25/20 12:18:37 PM 5/25/20 12:18:37 PM Reply	If possible choose default instance environment. Some packages enable you to roll up a current hard disk and then roll it out into their environment. The problem with that is they will be forced to provide the outside shell for all the true physical device drivers of that environment. If instead you install Linux from scratch, windows from scratch, whatever OS from scratch into the default instance environment you will be assured of perfect device driver activity. Also it will be much faster because they can take shortcuts and just put in stubs for stuff they know they won't need to do.
Post #434,163 by pwhysall 5/25/20 12:34:47 PM 5/25/20 12:36:08 PM Reply	Re: Ok, so how? 2) yes. I've done it for a failing Windows laptop containing needed applications. I've not done it for Linux, but imagine that it's probably simpler. If you google up "p2v" you will find a smorgasbord of information about the topic. For the avoidance of doubt, I'm talking about the Physical to Virtual transition, where your separate standalone running computer is transferred to a virtual machine image. There are tools to do this. Edited by pwhysall May 25, 2020, 12:36:08 PM EDT Expand All History
Post #434,166 by Another Scott 5/25/20 1:02:20 PM 5/25/20 1:02:20 PM Reply	Nice. Thanks for the pointer. E.g. https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows I would dearly love there to be a way to migrate A2D/Digital IO/RS485 comms ("DAQ") PCI interface cards to a VM. We've got a bunch of custom machine control software written in Delphi 7 that is almost impossible to upgrade because later versions of Delphi use Unicode strings which break the comms, the in-house author hasn't figured out to get around that, etc., etc. It runs Ok on Win 7 and should run on Win 10, but it's always a pain to get things reinstalled on moving to new hardware when a machine dies... (sigh) Cheers, Scott.
Post #434,170 by scoenye 5/25/20 9:38:37 PM 5/25/20 9:38:37 PM Reply	2) depends on your current active kernel Linux switched to a lightweight VM model where the guest OS can access the hardware without emulation. Current kernels are "paravirtual" ready. Older ones may not be and need virtual hardware drivers just like Windows. If yours is already paravirtualized, I think you'll be able to run it as a guest OS without making changes (although for safety, image the partitions an work off the copies.) For 1): the update schedule is that of the distribution chosen as the hypervisor. I've run the open version of the Xen hypervisor for a number of years. There is no immediate need to keep the hypervisor and guest OS in step. Kernel updates to the hypervisor would require a hardware reboot.
Post #434,171 by drook 5/25/20 10:17:55 PM 5/25/20 10:17:55 PM Reply	May not matter, I believe I've bricked it After the last release upgrade it ended on an error. I tried to finish the install and it said I needed to restart to complete the upgrade. When I rebooted it won't come up. If I can find a thumb drive with enough space I'll try a current install and just overwrite the whole thing. I backed up /home to an external USB hard drive before I started the whole process. Wait, duh, external USB hard drive. Going to see if I can make a bootable image on that. -- Drew
Post #434,172 by pwhysall 5/26/20 2:21:18 AM 5/26/20 2:21:18 AM Reply	10.04 works like a dream in VirtualBox The guest additions are a nice-to-have, not a have-to-have.
Post #434,362 by crazy 6/5/20 7:36:13 PM 6/5/20 7:36:13 PM Reply	Just came across this https://www.qubes-os.org/intro/ Looks very interesting.

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