Comments on: What should happen happen if I transplant a brain?

By: Dmitry Serpokryl

Dmitry Serpokryl — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 10:02:33 +0000

Welcome to checkout our unofficial Enlightenment LiveCD. We implemented simple check for video card ID already:

http://lizards.opensuse.org/2008/09/29/enlightenment-livecd/

yes, may be it’s a nice idea to keep an eye on Video_Card+Monitor instead of just a single card. Not an issue. It’s an easy task and it’s simply amazing how long this subject was discussed. It took us 3 min to implement this feature. Implementation is not perfect yet (we’ve forgot about backup of a current xorg.conf for example and may be something else left…) but you can easily improve this by editing /etc/init.d/create_xconf file. It starts GUI in LiveCD and if you install the system from LiveCD to the disk.

Regards.
sda

By: Jan-Christoph Bornschlegel

Jan-Christoph Bornschlegel — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 09:38:10 +0000

I partly disagree here: try changing your mainboard on W2KP, or an extra PCI IDE controller 🙂
After doing this two times I read an article explainig how mainboard change should work, tried this and voilà — failed again.

Cheers,
Jan

By: John Jeffers

John Jeffers — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 19:59:59 +0000

I want to be able to transplant my hard drive into a brand new laptop. (Actually dd the hard drive on to a new hard drive and chuck it in a new laptop.)

I want to be able to If I had a Nvidia Binary Driver and a New ATI 780G (3200 HD) boot into console mode and remove the Nvidia Driver as root.

Then run autoyast to reconfigure the unit and tell it to disregard the previous hardware.

I would far prefer openSuSE to boot and ask me if this is what I want to do! (Since I write Drivers and Kernel for ARM don’t tell me it can’t be done!)

And yes this is my working environment “embedded ARM 926” Linux development laptop that I use a JTAG Ice from and run Eclipse on! So reinstalling all the tools and configurations is not on.

Cheers John

By: bico

bico — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 08:13:32 +0000

I really don’t know what had happened to openSUSE, but the 9.x series of SuSE handled hardware change very well. I could put the os-harddrive in any computer and it would run without any kernel panics (probably due to the generic ide driver being included into initrd) and after detecting that the monitor/graphics card has changed it launched the YaST in textmode with a graceful notification of what is going on and let me reconfigure the display. It vas very functional and always worked for me. Besides this, it was capable of detecting new hardware while on the desktop via a tray applet. However since the 10.x series this functionality is nowhere to be found. In similar cases the best thing that can happen is to get a textmode login screen.

To overcome at least the possible graphics issues an init.d script could be run after xdm that launches the X server in vesa mode with generic settings if something goes wrong (ex. hardware change). I have created such a script for my system and it works quite well. It is a kind of bullet proof X, but it boots into the normal desktop and displays a warning.

By: Dimble

Dimble — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 07:29:18 +0000

i read that thread last night.

an excellent blog post with which i very much agree.

I have been using suse since 9.1 and i have no idea how to change hardware, more to the point i don’t care to learn such a complicated process.

In windows i click the remove driver button, then i swap old hardware with new, then i click on the new driver package and voila.

In linux i have no idea so a change of hardware means a reinstall, not good enough.

I have high hopes that the YAST folks can make this process logical to the uninformed, all it requires is a few prompts from YAST; “we noticed X has changed, would you like to run the autoconfig?”

That would be awesome!