You Greeks take pride in your logic. I suggest you employ it.

8 March 2010 21:50

Tomorrow, all being well, I'll receive a new computer.

I've always run Debian unstable upon my desktop in the past, partly because I wanted to have "new stuff" and partly because I needed a Debian unstable system for building Debian packages with.

However I'm strongly tempted to just install Lenny. I use that upon my work desktop and it does me just fine for surfing, building tools, and similar.

I can use pbuilder, sbuildd, or similar to build packages for upload to Debian, and if I want to experiment with new-hotness I can use a KVM guest or two.

Providing the hardware works with Lenny (and I have no reason to believe it won't) then there's no obvious downside I can think of.

The only potential complication will be restoring my backups, it is possible that my firefox databases, and similar things, might not work on older version. Still we shall see.

I plan to install software RAID, and run the system on LVM because quite frankly it rocks. Unless my current system fails in the next 24 hours I can use that to do the installation (My current desktop acts as a TFTP/DHCP/NFS server so I can use it to PXE-boot).

Anyway now I need to go eat food, tidy my desk, and decide what to call the machine .. At the moment the choice is between "march.my.flat" and birthday.my.flat, as my 34th birthday is on March 10th.

ObFilm: 300

Tags: birthday, birthday.my.flat, computers, flat, lenny, lvm, raid, sid | 7 comments

Comments on this entry

Steve Kemp at 11:30 on 12 March 2010

The issue isn't the synchronisation itself, instead it is the fear that different versions of database/passwords/settings will not work sensibly on different versions of firefox.

Karthik at 11:28 on 12 March 2010

>>it is possible that my firefox databases

just install weave extension. It synchronises everything across different computers.

Steve Kemp at 10:59 on 9 March 2010

Indeed kernels are an issue, but I'd expect to use my own for that and other reasons.

Robert - Yes I've been using novatech since 2003 and I've always liked their prices, service and reliability.

However I was greatly annoyed to discover that the machine I ordered today had only one SATA power connector - this is especially annoying on a machine advertised as having "onboard RAID". (Not that I'd use the onboard RAID myself)

Thankfully I have a SATA power adapter handy, or I'd have been forced to run with only a single drive.

bartman at 23:03 on 8 March 2010

KVM works better in newer kernels. Which is not to say that you need all of unstable or testing, you could run just the unstable/testing kernel, or build one yourself.

-Bart

Anonymous at 22:38 on 8 March 2010

"march" is shorter. :)

Steve Kemp at 22:45 on 8 March 2010

True, but given that it is the machine I'll be sat in front of in the evenings I'm way more likely to ssh from it than to it.

So that, combined with hostname completion, means length and typing complexity is mostly irrelevant.

Robert at 22:51 on 8 March 2010

OMG novatech still exist.

You Greeks take pride in your logic. I suggest you employ it.

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