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Topic: Weirdest migration path to Artix so far? (Read 1159 times) previous topic - next topic
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Weirdest migration path to Artix so far?

I have successfully configured two laptops with Artix so far, by installing from scratch: an old Dell Precision M4500 (2010) and a brand new Dell Precision 7720, both with Cinnamon as the DE.

When my Mint 17 desktop started acting up (issues with newer kernels supporting Spectre fixes), I decided to migrate this to Artix as well. However, I was to lazy to go through the whole configuration from scratch thing again.

The desktop system is a Core i7-5820k with Nvidia GTX 980 and NVME SSD, booting from UEFI. The Precision 7720 is a Xeon E3-1545 v5 with NVidia Quadro P4000, also booting from UEFI.

Here is what I did:

1. / and /home are on different partitions on both machines, / on the desktop was formatted and /home retained unchanged
2. Artix LXQT installed on the desktop (keeping the partition layout, so Artix was now using the old Mint 17 home)
3. Copied over the fully installed, configured and customized image from / on the Precision 7720 (not touching /home), overwriting the fresh Artix install on the desktop / (keeping the /boot/efi data)
4. Corrected fstab from a live environment to have correct UUIDs
5. Booted, system was running with only minor issues

Cinnamon got a bit confused with old settings and extensions, easy to fix. Network manager had issues with a blank space in path name for VPN connections, which did not bother the Mint 17 network manager, another easy fix. To my amazement, everything else worked right off the bat (including NVidia driver, Virtualbox, Evolution etc.), with the old environment neatly transplanted to Artix.

I was quite surprised it was that easy. :-)

TL;DR: cloning Artix to the root of what was Mint 17 resulted in a working installation in less than 20 minutes., with the old environment and user profile fully intact.

Re: Weirdest migration path to Artix so far?

Reply #1 –
The benefits of separate /home partitions!  :-)

Another one I routinely do is to copy the entire system (/home included) to newly formatted disk, properly chroot into it, regenerate fstab and grub.cfg, change hostname and IP (if static), put the disk back into its place, boot with the fallback initrd, mkinitcpio, change the xorg video driver if necessary, remove the old sshd keys and that's it.