Blog - /Tech

My Dell Inspiron 530 N came yesterday. I was immediately struck by the white sides of the case, which have some air intake vents. The surprising thing was their choice of the color white, since every Dell desktop that I've ever seen has been black. White, gray, and silver go well together.

I ordered it with Ubuntu preloaded. I took the default installation for a brief spin, noting their use of the cool oem-config-gtk package, which allows configuring of date/time, and a user account. I noticed that the Grub menu had an option called "Reinstall Ubuntu", or something similar, which was a nice touch.

I wanted to use LVM rather than have a single partition, so I wiped all of that out and used the Ubuntu Gutsy alternative install CD to perform an installation. They had an encrypted LVM setup option available this time, so I went with that. The password prompt at boot-up was difficult to read, and backspace and delete seemed to insert a character rather than perform deletions; hopefully that gets fixed at some point.

Alas, my /stuff partition became partially corrupted before I could transfer it to the new machine. Apparently with LVM partitions it is not enough to unmount the partition and mark the volumes and groups as unavailable before pulling the plug on the hard drive, which was a very unpleasant surprise. I should have just powered down the machine that the drive was plugged into. rsync was able to get through most of the partition before getting bogged down on a few files, so the damage shouldn't be too expensive. My almost universally bad experience with e2fsck in the past continues, as it has taken 21h36m and counting to scan and auto-repair this partition, producing 900MB of output in the process. One of the benefits of having a dual-core machine is that e2fsck can take 100% CPU time on one of the processors, and yet the computer is still usable.

Using git to manage /etc and /home made it very easy to get the new computer into working order. For /etc, I just copied the .git directory over, jury-rigged a quick install of DVC and Emacs 22, and was able to see exactly what changes existed between the default settings and my previous settings. Restoring a file that did not yet exist in the new setup was as easy as typing C-x V l to get a status buffer, marking the missing files, and hitting "U". Viewing changes made to an individual file involved moving to the file name and hitting "=". I was able to trim a lot of the stale files that I had from last year, and to make several updates. It has been my experience that once a difficult task can be moved into an Emacs GUI, it almost inevitably becomes easier.