[plug] reinstall for new core hardware?

[Cameron Patrick]

On Mon, Jan 05, 2004 at 04:50:04PM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:

| The only thing you're likely to need to change is the ethernet driver, 
| but since you're running mdk you may not even need to do that - it's 
| likely to autodetect the change.

(FWIW if you're running Debian you can install the "discover" package to
get network and sound drivers detected and loaded automatically -
assuming the appropriate modules exist for the kernel you're using.)

| >What I'm mostly interested in is the boot process, the first time in the 
| >new box.  Will the OS cope with the changes to the entire set of system 
| >resources?
| 
| You'll see an extreme case of 'failure to care'. The linux kernel 
| detects everything anew everytime it boots anyway, so only modules 
| loaded by userspace matter.

That 'failure to care' includes, for the most part, it failing to care
if something goes wrong. :-/  e.g. if the appropriate network driver
isn't loaded on the new machine, then you'll get error messages spewing
all over the place without the system seeming to be aware that
something's gone awry.  Aren't shell scripts wonderful like that? :-P

| As James noted, you may also need to fix the fstab if you rearrange your 
| drives. If you need to, just boot the system with 'single' on the kernel 
| command line, edit the fstab, and reboot.

Hmm, even 'linux single' will (try to) mount partitions from fstab.
I've normally done it with 'linux init=/bin/sh' but then again, I might
just be masochistic ;-)

| General linux, mostly. Hardware auto-detection varies between distros (

)  [Make sure you close brackets after yourself when you're done :-P]

Cameron.