Three cheers for Linux! Three cheers for RedHat!

Well, todady I just upgraded my client dev machine from an old Dell P3 to a new P4 clone plus dual head NVidia display. The P3 was running RedHat 9 with so much customization I couldn't face starting again.

I have upgraded many Windows, Mac and Unix boxes before, and braced myself for pain.

The process wen't something like this (a few misc. steps skipped for clarity):

1. Take the slow 8Gb HD out of the old box (no screwdriver necessary due to the nice Dell case)
2. Swap the drive in the new case (temporarily) to the 2nd IDE bus and plugged the old drive into the primary
3. Booted the box - started off the old drive fine
4. Accepted the default choices offered by RedHat's kudzu hardware config tool that came up automatically (now also available in fedora)
5. Everything came up fine with two exceptions: my sound card didn't work (tell someone who cares); and my screen was the wrong resolution (probably the default).
6. Download and run the NVidia driver installer for linux from NVidia.com
7. Copied and pasted some config options from NVidia's sample XFree86 config file - Now I have two monitors in Xinerama - woohoo!
8. Rebooted into single user mode
9. Ran "dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb" - ie. clone my drive please
10. Rebooted - checked the drive for errors and bad blocks with fsck -f -c for good measure
11. Booted up like normal - all good!

Total time taken: less than 1 hr plus 45 minutes waiting for the HD to be copied by dd (I went for a coffee).

Try doing that with a Windows box. Actually, another guy in the office had exactly the same hardware migration to do - but with a Windows installation. By the end of the day he's still not done...