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Hi.. It's been a great few season and I've learned SO much thanks to ARCH and the amazing community members. Which has also shown me how much more there is to enjoy. cool!
[OBJECTIVE / IDEA] : to be able to run either the laptop [main system] or the desktop when the laptop isn't available.
I have a main laptop and a desktop. I do not have the laptop available for several hours a day quite often. I am thinking:
Linux is robust. as far as I recall with the exception of xorg.conf and the rc.conf and ideally a video driver I should be able to CLONE the laptop partition to the desktop, swap the xorg.conf and have it run. I am NOT concerned about performance on the desktop just that any files I create or alter find there way back to the laptop without great confusion, loss or error on my part.
Can I use rSync or similar to intelligently move my entire partition [running as root] over to the desktop, then upon finishing copy and altered or new file back to the laptop main system? I don't really generate many files. Changes to my Firefox scrapbook, a folder of text files and perhaps install a package here and there.
I guess it's fairly routine to copy a user/root folder. [I'm the only user - mainly root actually] So, initially copying all the apps /usr/bin and the /etc folder and all has me wondering if a guru or two could fill me in on the gottchas or any clever ways to achieve this.
thanks for reading!
Last edited by yvonney (2009-03-13 05:56:32)
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Sorry if that's not what you're looking for:
keep your laptop running and use your desktop as a thin client by connecting to the laptop through XDMCP.
rsync might be a bit messy because you need to boot the desktop, rsync, reboot with the changes, and also everytime you need to leave, you need to do a rsync first.
you could also boot on the same usb disk on both machines.
about xorg.conf, go without it and rely on hal (and the adequate policies) to setup your hardware. you may want to modify the initscripts to detect the machine you are running on and load the right modules (but for most of them, it's not necessary).
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both points very interesting. I was aware of both though not specifically the finer points you mentioned. On the concept/idea. I'm not able to have the laptop on so that's not an option. Yes, messy and time consuming moving the files back and forth as well, not to mention the human error possibilities.
Still thinking how to conceptualize this. Any ideas welcomed of course.
Basically, I do need to use the desktop or suffer a few hours downtime, daily. eek! So, I'm prepared to do something about this if it's at all sensible.
thanks!
Last edited by yvonney (2009-03-13 07:33:15)
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I'm not speaking from experience here, although I've wanted to do something similar to keep my laptop and desktop in sync. However I wanted to suggest that you DO use rsync, as this is pretty much one of the things it is designed for, although I would limit the syncing to probably /home only and keep packages in sync by hand so things don't go sour (I'm not sure what _would_ go sour by syncing /usr/bin etc but you never know). You can probably automate the syncing to an extent using cron or another similar method.
Just my two cents.
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Nice HashBox...
Can rsync be set to NEVER overwrite NEWER files is one big point. I don't mind what happens to the desktop just avoiding file loss catastrophy would be good.
Now I'm looking to get into the doing of it, and looking to become a bit more informed without having to do the, learning expert tips/best practices by taking a lotta time and mistakes to do so. This one I'd like to see happen fairly quickly as it's not a problem if the desktop breaks or something.... the ONLY issue is messing up rsync and having files get overwritten.
stil thinking.
Last edited by yvonney (2009-03-13 16:52:19)
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As I'm not concerned about speed I thought perhaps boot the desktop from an external drive would be a good way to have an insync copy of the laptop. Now need to think it through. Any thought welcomed still. :--)
Last edited by yvonney (2009-03-13 19:14:05)
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I don't use rsync regularly enough to tell you the command line options for it, but if you look them up there should be options concerning how to sync, you can basically tell it to sync one way only, or take the newest version off each etc, it's pretty flexible
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yes, I guess there's nothing better than really knowing where the data is, and where it's going to ...and use rsync well.
I'll probably get around to experiementing [eek] next week hopefully. Hope to write here then.
best wishes for a great weekend!
Last edited by yvonney (2009-03-14 07:25:23)
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