I recently received a new computer at work, and instead of re-installing, I took the hard drive from my existing machine and installed it in the new machine. After making sure it was sitting in the same place on the same IDE controller, everything worked almost fine (obviously I needed to change my kernel to use the correct sound/network drivers and X to use the new graphics card, but that was all predictable). Linux is great - I wouldn't dare *try* this trick under Windows!
However, I came across a couple of small issues as part of this upgrade that I'd be interested in seeing whether anyone can solve... 1) The old computer had the system clock in localtime, and since I now only run Debian I'd like to switch it to use GMT. Where is this configured? I know that it gets selected at install-time, but where can I change it afterwards? 2) When I tried to take advantage of the bigger graphics card and monitor, my X display started wobbling uncontrollably. The effect is like using a 40Hz display, except that instead of flashing, it just wobbles back and forth rapidly. The interesting thing is that I've seen this effect on the previous hardware too, and had chalked it up to a poor monitor - but I now have a KDS Visual Sensations 21" monitor which displays 1600x1200 faster than my video card can even drive it. Any mode over 1024x768 seems to display this effect, and even 1024x768 does it a little, but much slower (more like 0.5Hz, so it's like a very slow-moving underwater effect and easy to get used to). People with similar (and some with identical) hardware running Windows NT and Win2K aren't having this issue - I don't dual-boot so I can't confirm that windows is ok on *my* hardware, but the fact that every component of the computer except the hard-drive was changed suggests that it may be a software issue. Has anyone seen this effect and does anyone know how to fix it? 3) Now that I have 2 huge hard drives on my box I was thinking about using Software RAID to get a little bit of redundancy in case a drive goes out. I've been reading the two Software-RAID howtos but they seem slightly out of date - the 0.4.x version seems to pre-date the stable 2.2 kernel, and the other version claims to only deal with 2.3.x. I am running 2.2.17-pre6 (the current kernel-source-2.2.17 package from woody) - which of the HOWTOs, if either, applies? Is Soft-RAID in 2.2.17-pre6 ready for use by a relatively inexperienced administrator? If I use mirroring, is it going to be at least as reliable as a regular filesystem in the face of power outages etc? How much special configuration do I need to do to get it to work (a valid answer to this would be "the exact amount described in XXX howto" - so long as you identify which of the two howtos :) )? Is Soft-RAID worth it for a development machine, or would I be better off just scrapping the idea and making sure all my important partitions are backed up? Thanks in advance, Stuart.
