Tuesday, 03 Feb 2009

Miraculous

While at linux.conf.au a few weeks ago, my laptop decided to blow. It had been twitchy with suspend and resume for about a day, and then Tuesday, not 48 hours until I was scheduled to give the GTK & GNOME tutorial, the thing quite petulantly decided to stop booting. No POST. Nothing. Zap.

Eeek!

Now, laptops breaking are nothing special, and I do keep fairly regular backups. So I wasn’t that concerned about data loss. But in so far as the live-action style tutorials I give are less about formal presentation slides (though I do have lots of those as backdrop) and instead more “everyone gather around and watch Andrew play in his happy place”, suddenly losing my development meant that actually coding live in front of people was looking to be a bit of a problem.

My current laptop is from ASUS, and I’ve been very happy with it. That it fried, ok, fine whatever. But as we were now in Hobart, Tasmania I had a real problem. I needed a mainboard replacement. Fast. ASUS has service centres in Perth, Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne. But not Hobart.

Several people offered to lend me a laptop “for the presentation” which was lovely of them, but given that it wasn’t just me playing a slide deck but rather me needing my full development stack on board such a machine — and more to the point, me needing my system so I could get back to real work during and after the conference — my option space was very limited. Indeed, it took me all of about 3 seconds to realize that I was going to be on a flight (to Melbourne, probably) in about 90 minutes. Sure I could have couriered it and had it back in a “few days” but I patently did not have that kind of time.

Steve to the rescue

I was in the process of booking my flight out when Steve Walsh suggested that he might have a system I could use. At first it was borrowing one of the desktop machines they had around (yup, would have worked), but then he realized he might be able to lend me “the conference laptop”, which was a computer that Hewlett-Packard had donated to linux.conf.au a year or so ago. Josh wasn’t using it anymore, and Ben agreed I could use it. You guys are awesome.

As I was thinking about what I’d have to do to bootstrap and restore off of my closest available backup (on an SD card, but that’s a story for another day), I saw one of these lying on the table

and we suddenly had a very bright idea. Why not pop the hard drive out of my laptop and put it in that thing?

I had already considered putting my hard drive into the new laptop, but only for a brief moment. Even assuming it fit, I happen to have a very tightly tuned kernel and I knew was unlikely to have enough drivers to get booted on foreign hardware. Besides, the Linux installation on the new laptop was already running great.

But why not try putting my drive into Steve’s external USB enclosure? Would that even be possible?

Steve cracked his enclosure open and carefully extracted his drive. Then we started removing endless screws from my system and found our way down to the harddisk compartment and pulled my drive out:

To be honest, I would never have attempted such a thing, but Steve knew what he was doing (and more importantly, had all his tools handy). So, having taken the cradle off of my drive, we even more delecately then attached the enclosure’s logic board to my drive.

• Miracle #1: the connector from my drive fit the one in the enclosure.

(I gather that these things are “standardized” but still. The hardware you find in your average laptop is always wacky and weird. So I was pretty excited) With that done, we plugged it into the new system:

and to my supreme happiness,

• Miracle #2: the drive’s filesystems mounted to /media/disk

Hooray for the Linux kernel, HAL, the GNOME automounter, Nautilus, and everything else that made that work.

And then, even better,

• Miracle #3: whatever it was that took out my laptop’s mainboard did not zorch my hard drive.

Hooray! My data was all ok!

A little fiddling about to make sure there was now a user andrew with a matching UID on the Ubuntu system, and then, very simply:

$ rsync -av... /media/disk /home/andrew

Outstanding.

So thanks to the help of Steve and the others, I had my /home on this new system. And one of the magic things about the GNOME Desktop for the last few years has been them safely writing down everything you need to run, so pretty much instantly I had my happy place back.

The data, at least.

Comparing distros; comparing laptops

The one problem I still faced was that the system in hand was not configured as a development machine. I had to work out what the appropriate packages were for all the different bits and pieces I was accustomed to having.

One thing I really like about Gentoo is that they clued in long ago that disk space is cheap and that things like .h files don’t take up that much room. So when you install a package on Gentoo you get development tools, header files, debug symbols [if so configured], compilers, documentation, the works. I had forgotten that Debian and Debian derived systems like Ubuntu do not install all the development libraries and tools. So I proceeded to tear my hair out for over a day wading through endless package lists trying to find what I would need to get development headers and the various tools necessary to build software (the morning of the tutorial I discovered the laptop didn’t have any man pages. What the hell?)

Granted, such things are essentially trivialities, and I accept that they were the sort of thing that one runs into when working on a new system. No big deal. Sure I could easily have built a Gentoo system in less time, but it’s not my machine and in any case I was enjoying the learning experience.

Far more interesting was living on a new distro for a few weeks. It was nice to experience all this “polish” that I’ve heard people going on about, and I was indeed duly impressed. After a while, though, I started to notice all kinds of little changes that Canonical has made to the Desktop that are really cool, but which have not been contributed back upstream to GNOME. That bothers me a little bit, but I’m hopeful that in time this sort of practise will fade in favour of them working more closely with the upstream projects they are using.

Meanwhile I also got to trial a new laptop brand. I gotta say I was really impressed with the build quality, robustness, and power efficiency of the HP corporate laptop line. This one is a couple model-years old, but I was able to have a few good chats with Bdale Garbee about it and he walked me through their current line up. After this experience I can definitely say that we will be getting HP laptops in the future.

Drove me nuts having a different keyboard layout to deal with for a few weeks. And having just about spent enough time on it to get it in my fingers, now my laptop is repaired and I’m once again mistyping everything… :)

Again, thanks to Steve who totally saved the day. And thanks to everyone anywhere who ever contributed to all the wonderful software that made the transfer from one system to another miraculous — and easy.

What about next time?

So what I have I learned?

I travel a huge amount, and having my laptop blow up is clearly something I need to be more prepared for. Remote backups are still necessary, of course, and the SD card I carry around with more or less continues snapshots of my critical files is also clearly going to continue.

But it’s kinda obvious to me now that it would be a good idea to carry around an external USB enclosure with a hard drive big enough to back up my entire system — nice encrypted partition and all set, just rsync the whole damn thing. Disk space is cheap. Along with a boot partition holding a nice generic runs-everywhere kernel, that would be enough to not only recover from, but also boot from live the next time my computer fries.

AfC

laptop-boom, posted by Andrew Cowie in software/gnome-desktop at 2009-02-02T13:16:07Z

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