Swapping laptop casing / using same HDD Mint 12

[daveinuk]

Hello Folks, just bought another Lenovo T61 after my other machine died a couple of days ago. Googled beep codes and it looked to be either MB failure/ power related or a combo of both ......... I have bought a machine, same model, and I think identical spec's so I could just swap HDD's and boot.
All seems to be ok except for a bit of a scrambled screen on boot (splash?), pic' below and maybe someone can enlighten me as to how to rememdy this ?

More importantly, is there anything I should or can do to update the machine in general as although it may be the same in principle, isn't there the possibility that some of the harware/firmware is slightly different ? I might be thinking too far ahead as up to now all seems well but thought I'd throw the question out there just in case, but it does boot ok....

[xenopeek]

Drivers are only an issue if you needed to install any drivers on your previous laptop. Usually for things like your graphics card or wireless chip you might need to install a driver if the manufacturer is running a protection racket ("you be nice, buy windows, else we come by and break your laptop"). The specs in your signature suggest a lot of Intel chips, so probably you didn't need to install drivers on your previous laptop and the drivers for your hardware were already in the kernel and automatically loaded on boot. You can continue using it then, no need to reinstall.

[DrHu]

Mmmm..
Well it is probably just a resolution issue for the screen being loaded (vesa mode) or a blip when trying to find the specific vendor driver, T61 I think may use nvidia, you will know the hardware specs of your machine (not listed in your post)

Code: Select all

 inxi -G
inxi -F

--after a boot

If it ios only a glitch on the boot, and the desktop does appear with full hardware rendering working correctly (assuming you do need a vendor's binary driver..), then either more information would be needed or simply ignore the issue, since it would be temporary and otherwise the machine runs correctly for you
--might also be the boot splash function, you can make the boot load line be quiet instead of quiet splash, that may remove the screen glitches..

N'est Pas

[daveinuk]

The terminal gave me this :

ThinkPad-T61 ~ $ inxi -G
Graphics: Card: nVidia G84M [Quadro NVS 140M] X.Org 1.10.4 drivers nouveau unloaded: fbdev,vesa Resolution 1440x900@60.1hz
GLX Renderer Gallium 0.4 on NV86 GLX Version 2.1 Mesa 7.11
dave@dave-ThinkPad-T61 ~ $ inxi -F
System: Host dave-ThinkPad-T61 Kernel 3.0.0-12-generic i686 (32 bit) Desktop Gnome Distro Linux Mint 12 Lisa
Machine: System LENOVO (portable) product 766313G version ThinkPad T61
Mobo LENOVO model 766313G Bios LENOVO version 7LETB2WW (2.12 ) date 02/20/2008
CPU: Dual core Intel Core2 Duo CPU T7500 (-MCP-) cache 4096 KB flags (lm nx sse sse2 sse3 ssse3 vmx)
Clock Speeds: (1) 800.00 MHz (2) 800.00 MHz
Graphics: Card: nVidia G84M [Quadro NVS 140M] X.Org 1.10.4 drivers nouveau unloaded: fbdev,vesa Resolution 1440x900@60.1hz
GLX Renderer Gallium 0.4 on NV86 GLX Version 2.1 Mesa 7.11
Audio: Card Intel 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller driver HDA Intel Sound: ALSA v: 1.0.24
Network: Card-1 Intel PRO/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN [Kedron] Network Connection driver iwl4965
IF: wlan1 state: up mac: 00:1d:e0:cc:67:ed
Card-2 Intel 82566MM Gigabit Network Connection driver e1000e
IF: eth1 state: down speed: 4294967295 Mbps duplex: full mac: 00:1e:37:90:cd:a8
Drives: HDD Total Size: 120.0GB (57.7% used) 1: /dev/sda HITACHI_HTS54251 120.0GB
Partition: ID:/ size: 109G used: 65G (63%) fs: ext4 ID:swap-1 size: 2.10GB used: 0.00GB (0%) fs: swap
Sensors: System Temperatures: cpu: 60.0C mobo: 42.0C
Fan Speeds (in rpm): cpu: 3304
Info: Processes 136 Uptime 4:09 Memory 433.6/1981.1MB Client Shell inxi 1.7.7

If that helps let me know, I can live with the garbled screen but I'll look into the boot splash as you suggested, thanks for the replies I appreciate your help.

[AlbertP]

Ok, this is a common issue with Nouveau, it also happens on my laptop when I have no NVIDIA driver installed. Please install the NVIDIA graphics driver from Additional Drivers.

[daveinuk]

Thank you both very much . . .. the drivers did the trick - first reboot and it's back to a nice clean boot up

I had a feeling something would need updating, all looking good so far cheers !

Dave

[AlbertP]

Mint 12 is of course outdated (14 is just out) but it's fine to keep using it until April 2013. That April it will reach end of support; for now, you don't need to upgrade it yet.

[daveinuk]

Then can i pick your brain a little more then Albert

I've held off upgrading cos' of the glitches/freezes etc with 13, hoping by the time came when support was discontinued for 12, it'd all have been taken care off.

So i have two questions:

I've never attempted to upgrade by the dist-upgrade method using terminal so I'd like to try it at some point, I know it's slower than using an iso image and doing a clean install but I can live with that for the sake of trying it. I've read about doing a clean install and copying over the home directory to preserve all your date, tweaks, settings etc which sounds simple in theory, but am I understanding it right? Do you literally copy the home directory to an exernal source then copy it back over after install to overwrite the existing home folder?

Is it really that simple and is that a MUCH better method than installing the dist-upgrade packages over the net??

Thanks again . . . . . Edit: is 14 a long term support version??

Dave

[AlbertP]

The official upgrading tutorial is here: http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2
What it does is backing up the data with mintbackup.

And every two years a long term support version is released. At the moment that is Mint 13 with support till 2017.

[daveinuk]

Thanks again Albert . . . . . don't know why it took me so long to think of this but I can trial 14 on the spare HDD I now have with this new machine lol . . . . .

Does the backup process do the lot i.e usernames, passes etc that are saved or is that another bunch of separate backups to do in firefox etc??