This is an early entry.
For those who have been following along, I finally built a new PC for my mum, and have installed the latest Xubuntu release that supports the new 11-th Generation ``Rocket Lake'' CPU. The stress test had successfully been concluded (my jealousy of the better thermals despite stock everything notwithstanding), and the PC was all but ready to be released back to my mum.
The only thing left to do was to migrate the old data that she had in the previous PC into the new one.
It is not as though my mum has a lot of source code or documents---instead, she has quite a bit of digital images/videos from the various cameras (phone and otherwise) over the years; it is best to think of it as a digital equivalent of a photo album. I definitely needed to ensure those files are available to her, as are her web page bookmarks in Firefox. She has already made her back-ups on the external HDD that I bought her recently, but I didn't want to use those since I could just use the original HDD directly connected into the new PC via SATA.
Anyway, I took apart the old PC and extracted the Hitachi 3.5" HDD (manufactured in 2009!) together with its SATA cable. It was then that I realise why it was impossible for me to do the type of cable management now then---the folded sheet metal that was used to construct the chassis simply had no space behind the motherboard for any form of cable management; it would seem that leaving about 50 mm of space between the mounting braces for the motherboard is a recent thing. That would explain a lot actually, and confirmed my observation that modern PC building was definitely much less painful than before. For instance, it is actually conceivable to build a nice water-cooled CPU set up with radiator now, whereas in the old days, anything that was not air-cooled via heat sinks and copious amounts of fan-mediated air flow was simply inconceivable---it was nearly impossible to route the liquid cooling lines through a constrained three-dimensional space with cables running every which way. This included the extra power cables from the non-modular power supplies. Incidentally, my mum's new PC does not have a modular power supply, mostly because the components that the mobo has onboard is just too few to justify potentially requiring more connectors.
The old HDD was connected into the new PC, and I booted it up, being careful to ensure that I did not accidentally boot off the operating system that was on the old disk. I didn't have to worry after all, since the old disk was using BIOS mode, while the new set up was all UEFI---there was just no way of booting off the old disk without doing some changes to the BIOS. Subsequent actions included mounting the /home directory into the new system's directory tree, and then copying out all the contents of the user-directory corresponding to my mum's previous system into the new one, before finally setting the correct ownership information.
After that was done, I spent a little bit of time setting up the rest of the environment for her, from importing her bookmark settings and reseting the desktop background image to be the same as the one she had before. When these were all done at my ``work bench'', I powered things down and took out the old HDD with SATA cable to be put away, closed up the chassis, and brought it back to the movable PC trolley to mount the new build.
I was so afraid that it wouldn't fit, but it turns out that my fears are unfounded. The width of the new PC was the same as the old one, but the height was only about 25 mm or so taller than the old one, which meant that it fit well. I plugged all the old peripherals back into place, including the monitor's VGA cable that went first into the HDMI-VGA adaptor before plugging the adaptor into the HDMI slot.
The biggest thing that I was worried about was the usability of the wireless mouse, since it was using an external dongle. After plugging everything in and powering on, I was first horrified that the screen was showing a really stretched out 1024×768 display, and then delighted that the wireless mouse worked out-of-the-box. I cussed out under my breath and just logged in first. I wanted to look at the display settings to verify some things before I completely cussed out everyone and everything.
Thankfully, it was just one of the many detected modes for the Acer monitor, and I quickly set it to 1920×1080, as was needed.
It worked well, of course (otherwise I would be writing something else). Naturally, I did my rudimentary tests with ye olde Gangnam Style, including testing the auto-switching of the audio out to the headphones when plugged in versus defaulting to the line out (to the speakers). Everything worked well.
So it was time to invite mum back to try her new rig.
She was excited. I had told her that I was likely to hand over her new machine to her on Sunday, but I was obviously doing so much earlier. I walked her through the hardware connections, pointed out where the power button and headphone jack were, and explained to her how her new built-in wireless internet antennae needed to towards the wireless router. I had her logged in and showed her where everything that she used to use were were.
She was very pleased with her new rig. She had only two complaints---the first one was how the text was all small (easily fixed with setting the default font in Xfce (the windowing manager of Xubuntu) to be larger), and the other was how all her bookmark icons looked weird.
That second one was a side effect of importing bookmarks from HTML. Apparently, only the title and URL are imported for each link in their specific directories, but the favicons were not stored anywhere. It was a bummer but not a game-breaker. I could, in theory, try to hunt down those favicon images from the old Firefox settings directory from the old HDD and then send them in to the new one, but... eh... it requires effort. But then again, now that I have found a method to do it automatically, maybe I can effect it? Argh...
Anyway, apart from all that, she's pleased with the set up. She's actually shocked at how fast the whole machine was booting into the desktop---the old system took quite a while to load things up.
All in all, I am pleased with the build. It checked off one of the things on my list of things to do (the remaining include going to the dentist for cleaning, and some other stuff that I vaguely remember but don't want to shove it here just yet).
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I should have written this yesterday, but I had written a little too much yesterday. I didn't go into Night City, but went dungeon diving in Jupiter Hell. It has been a while since my last playthrough, and there has been quite a bit of updates. Anyway, I managed to claim a win in Angel of Marksmanship, one of the many challenge modes. I've written about that particular run in the forum post, and so do check it out for the details.
I'm sort of torn between playing more Jupiter Hell or Cyberpunk 2077 today. We'll see how it goes.
Till the next update then.
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