reinstall Feisty server

[LuckyMe]

Hi everybody,

I have f****-up my motherboard and have now changed my AMD Duron 1.2Ghz with an AMD64 x2 2.0Ghz.

The disks are connected via an external (not on board) SATA controller and also the network cards are not on board. And the system is of course not running a GUI.

So the question is if there is a chance to get the current installation running on the new mother board or if it is better to reinstall from scratch. (I know, reinstall is always better.) The old system I have just installed a week ago and the configuration is so fresh, that I do not have a back up of all the config files yet.

So, ladies and gentlemen, what do you recommend me to do?

Cheers
... LuckyMe

[ladoga]

I guess you want to take advantage of your new 64bit CPU cores. If so then download the installer for 64bit arch and do it from scratch.

If you're ok running it as 32bit, then old install should work fine.

You can swap hard disks between computers and boot linux from them pretty much as you like given that you stay within the same CPU arch and use your distributions stock kernels. If you have built a custom kernel with support for all unnessary hardware removed, then it naturally wont work on other systems.

[LuckyMe]

Hi ladoga,

thanks for your reply. I thought the same last night and downloaded the 64bit version of the Ubuntu server distro while I puzzled the new machine together.

After the installation I mounted the old disk and copied most of the config files to the new system. All the basic services like DHCP, DNS, Samba, etc are already up and running. And the rest I will finish tonight.

Good to know that you can swap the disks so easily between the machines as I was a bit concerned in regards to the chipset drivers of the motherboard. But as you describe it that is never a problem - given I stay within the same processor architecture, of course.

Cheers
... LuckyMe

[ladoga]

But as you describe it that is never a problem - given I stay within the same processor architecture, of course.

Yes it's because most distributions' stock kernels have all those drivers compiled in the kernel or as modules. If you swap disk to an other computer the kernel automatically loads the necessary drivers for that hardware. Hardware support is not any different from a fresh install (with the same kernel).

[Syngin]

On a side note, I found yesterday that Ubuntu Server doesn't come with a desktop preinstalled, but its really easy to do yourself. Just run one of the following and it'll go and grab everything you need depending on which desktop you want:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop