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Same HD, New PC

Serge Y. Stroobandt

Copyright 2014–2018, licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA

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Introduction

Someone in my family breaks, on average, a new consumer notebook computer every 18 months…

Panasonic Toughbook CF-52
Left desperate, I bought her a late 2007, second-hand, semi-rugged Panasonic Toughbook™ CF-52 Mk1. This ageless, MIL-STD-810F standard notebook features an Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T7100 —2MB cache, 1.80GHz clock speed, 800MHz FSB—, 2048MB 667MHz-clocked DDR2 RAM, Intel® GMA X3100 graphics and of course a carrying handle. It weighs in at 3.45kg without counting its sizeable 0.82kg, 8A, 15.6V power “brick”. Not that this computer consumes a lot of power; the high current rating is for charging its massive 86.6Wh battery which delvers over 8 hours of autonomy.

Enough bragging… The Toughbook™ was given a thorough cleaning after removing the Windows™ XP stickers. Its hard disk was replaced with the one of the broken notebook which already ran Xubuntu 12.04 LTS. The CF-52 booted without any problem. Admittedly, I still had GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_osi=Linux" in /etc/default/grub, which dates back to the broken notebook. The WLAN adapter got up and running without any hocus pocus.

Nonetheless, whenever pulling a hard disk from one computer and putting it into another one, a few configuration changes may be deemed necessary. These are listed below.

Keyboard layout

The new system may have a different keyboard layout. Changing the keyboard layout in the desktop manager is all too easy. However, in adverse times, it is good to have the keyboard layout of the [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[F1]…[F6] consoles configured correctly in advance. Here is how that is done.

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration
$ sudo reboot

Hostname

If you are like me, naming your computers after their CPU or model name, you will need to change the hostname of the sytem. On Debian-based systems, two /etc files require editing:

$ sudo gvim /etc/hostname
$ sudo gvim /etc/hosts
$ sudo reboot

Public SSH key

$ gedit .ssh/id_rsa.pub

Sensors

lm-sensors

$ sudo sensors-detect
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Last update: Wednesday, September 1, 2021.