Fremantle
· Kubuntu · Linux · backups ·
It's that time of the year again (or that time of the fiveyear, given that this is an LTS release) when I upgrade my laptop to the latest version of Kubuntu. This time it's to version 24.04 (from April this year, hence the version number). I try to take notes whenever I upgrade a machine, so this post is me doing that. I'll try to also update my uses page to reflect current reality.
- Triple-checked my backups, both in the cloud via Borg and locally on a USB hard drive. The local one is a dump of my home directory, excluding whatever's listed in rsync-homedir-excludes, so it's full of vast amounts of rubbish (or, "files for my work" I guess). The cloud one is stuff I actually care about.
- Downloaded the latest image, copied to a thumb drive with Startup Disk Creator, rebooted from that thumb drive, installed Kubuntu.
- Logged in to the new system, and started rsync to restore the local backup. That takes a while, so other setup happens while it's going.
- Banged my head against my Lenovo USB dock until the external monitor started working. As far as I can tell, this was a random process of rebooting a few times and smashing the input selector button on the monitor until there was some point of synchronicity between it all. I mean, it's not called xrandr for no reason!
- Installed KeePassXC so I could access my passwords. My DR process for this is to have my password vault stored separately, and usually even when I don't need to I'd use that version of it just to confirm that it's all good. But I was lazy this time and just used the copy from the local hard drive.
- Installed Floccus in Firefox, to sync my bookmarks back from Nextcloud. And the Nextcloud desktop client to sync a folder of phone-laptop sort of stuff.
- Installed Thunderbird, Telegram, Slack, Discord, and Element.
- Switch left alt and ctrl, and make capslock the Compose key.
- Experienced a weird bug with Firefox. No typing, no cursor. Most annoying.
And a bunch of other things, mostly unrelated to actually getting up and running: MariaDB, PHP, and whatnot. Part of what I like about nuking things every year or two is that it makes me re-evaluate what I've got installed and read about updates and changes and things, lots of which means that the system I end up with is somewhat different to the one it replaced.