Texas Holdem Strategy

darvon · Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 7:56 pm Post subject: Taking the Leap...to Linux

I have a slow ongoing problem. I have about 6 PCs in various locales in the house and about every year one of them needs maint/replacement.

I don't do much advanced with them, but it is truly a PITA to reinstall everything. Especially since I don't HAVE the blasted software CDs or especially the boxes with the KEYS on them. As they come in over the years. I am looking for a PC box that is easy to get back online when it fails. If I can find a way to get one given the constraints that I throw away(effectively) the CDs and Keys, then I will standardize upon it and propagate it.

I want to either repair or replace the dead box and then ZAP, get back to where I was before, without having to reinstall each app seperately as well as the data, as well as the saved settings, as well as the saved passwords and tendancies and cookies and ..... you get the drift.

I don't mind buying new HW or getting it repaired when necessary, but getting back to where I was once the HW is running is torturous.

I do email EUDORA, EXCEL, WORD, and internet. That's about it.

So bugs suggested taking the Leap to Linux with his tutoledge/help/pity.

I have been around UNIX systems (including selling them) since VAXes, but I am not an engineer, plus it has been a long time, so I am really needy for Bugs' (and everyone else's here) help.

Instead of building my own PC, I took one that just failed this week, the Kitchen PC, an HP a320n desktop, put in a new HD (that was what failed) and now have a working PC without a OS.

I will discuss my trials and successes herein.

I am trying out Tbird on my interim Kitchen PC (I had an old klunker lying about) to see what the problems will be substituting it for my dear Eudora. I have already hit a few problems, I will post a complete set later.

nsidestrate · ITH MVP Joined: 26 May 2004 Posts: 21319

Isn't Eudora 8 (penelope) fully based on Thunderbird these days?

linky

darvon · Posted: Sat May 17, 2008 9:17 pm Post subject:

Yeah, but I stopped at Eudora 5.

In 6 and 7 they put in stuff that messed things up.

I actually uprgraded to 7 for a few months and then stumbled on old loads of 5.3 and went retro

Ohjay · Joined: 03 Sep 2005 Posts: 951 Location: Sweden

Have you ever considered "ghosting"?

Make a clean install with all the applications you need on one computer then make a ghost image of the things installed.
Then the next time you need to reinstall everything, just pop in the ghost image and it will make a clean reinstall with everything for you back to the way they were at the beginning.

darvon · Posted: Sun May 18, 2008 11:52 am Post subject:

I am finding some things out the make a Linux brick less than optimal. What I plan to do is:

1) Make a Linux Brick and see how that works for a couple months and note the shortcomings.

2) Make a XP Brick and see how close I can get to what I want.

3) Decide which I want to propagate to all my units.

Ghosting and some "Disk cloning" software is part of the investigation for Step 2. I need to understand how I would make a "Ghost image" and how I would reinstall it on another system. Up earlier in this thread someone recommended some disk cloning software which is in my plans.

Basically what I want to be able to do with a XP Brick is:

1) have a way to make a "clone" of my system disk off to a Firewire external, preferrably in a manner that can be automated and regularly scheduled on off hours.-

2) Assuming PC death by meteor strike, to take the external HD and buy a new PC from Best Buy and somehow use the XHD to make the new PC look exactly like the old PC at time of clone snapshot. In an easy and relatively automated manner.

Step 2 would be optimal if I can do it without CDs or Keys for any software that was on the original, as Keys are easily lost, as are CDs, especially over multiple years. Plus sometimes applications have no CDs and keys were emailed and may not be easily found several years later.

That's what I want out of the Linux brick, or the XP brick. Plus I would like to use Bugs' help to make a very lean XP on the XP brick.

I am going to do BOTH and see which makes more sense to propegate.

Stay tuned, gonna take a few months...

darvon · Posted: Mon May 26, 2008 8:54 am Post subject:

Sullen_Scrota · Joined: 06 Jun 2006 Posts: 814

If you have spare disks, ghosting with linux is simplicity itself.

Let me know if interested.

darvon · Posted: Tue May 27, 2008 6:17 pm Post subject:

Getting a external hard disk to simply mount, was NOT simplicity itself.

I am in the middle of trying to do that with Bugs' immense tutolage, and it is 7 hours and counting as I type.

darvon · Posted: Wed May 28, 2008 7:56 pm Post subject:

OK. Reports from the front.

Bugs and I are in the middle of mounting the XHD in a writable way. Not quite there yet.

We have spent considerable time dealing with the XHD for a simple, yet hard reason. Because the XHD was preformatted with MAC OS it made things complicated, but most people are going to get an XHD which has some format upon it. The problem with UNIX is that it is built to be modified by the end-user (as superuser). It makes it easy to get an optimal system, but it requires more knowledge than other OS, because it doesn't make simplifying limitations.

I could simply plug in my Out of Box XHD and it mounted, but read-only. Can it be fixed? Sure. But it has taken a while for Bugs (thru the filter of communicating with me via IM) to go thru the hunt and peck of figuring it out. Without his knowledge, it would have been a pretty onerous process for me. It would have forced me to learn a lot of things I don't necessarily want to learn.

But we are doing this because Off the Shelf MS and Mac solutions don't fit my requirements. But this is the underlying issue with Unix. Its strength and weakness. And the GUI hasn't completely erased it yet.

We go forward....

Internet Texas Holdem

Poker Forum

Party Poker Bonus

PokerStars Bonus