Well I getting the new computer going. I didn’t do a straight migration from the old machine as I had been planning. The new machine (a dell Vostro 220) needs a fairly new kernel and I just didn’t feel like debootstrapping from a live CD. That was my original plan, but it was looking to be such a pain, and wouldn’t work with the CD’s I had burned, and I could get started with a Lenny netinst CD almost right away and let the thing run overnight without supervision.

Of course now I have a load of work getting things straight so a night saved wasn’t such a great economy. Copying over the home directory was easy enough but I still haven’t got all the dpkg selections from the old machine downloaded yet. My download speeds are lousy. I am installing software piecemeal.

The new machine is plenty fast enough but, at half the price of the old machine, it lacks some finesse. The CPU fan is cheap and noisy, especially with the fan control that you get when running from a console. The speed cycles from dead slow to max fast and back again — an undamped harmonic oscillator as a fan regulator — great. Oddly, when running X the fan speed is more controlled. I’m hoping that when I compile my custom kernel I can get rid of this problem. I do hope it is reasonably documented.

X is pain too. The graphics chip is too new for Lenny which feature froze this summer. That means I’ll have to compile an X server too. I plan to backport from debian experimental. Surprisingly the VESA based X11 I am using for now isn’t slow at all. It does show different colour response to the old machine, and gamma correction in the xorg.cong file makes no difference to the VESA driver despite what the log files say. Irritating.

I don’t seem to have any sound yet, but that is probably a simple configuration issue; I haven’t got all the controls installed yet. xxdiff is a big timesaver in merging by old and new etc. xxdiff was the what forced me to get any X working. After the standard config failed I was going to leave this until the tool chain was fully installed, but a decent diff tool took precedence. There appear to be some Lenny specific glitches too. Time for bed.