Thanks to everyone for the helpful input. It looks like there is no advantage to converting to 64-bit, which is just fine with me. The new machine has 4GB of RAM, so I am not hitting address space issues. I don't do anything more CPU-intensive than spam filtering. I do occasionally do some I/O-intensive stuff (particularly backups onto its external RAID), plus I have a GigE switch, so a GigE port does matter to me.
It looks like it will be worth my while to copy partitions over to the new disk, if only so I can increase the size of my root partition (which I foolishly made too small). Beyond that, it looks like the transition will be very easy. Thank you all for the guidance. Now it's time to burn a live CD and get copying. --Greg On Mon, Aug 12, 2013 at 02:08:40PM -0600, Bob Proulx wrote: > Stan Hoeppner wrote: > > Moral of the story? The OP may need to spend ~$30 USD for an Intel > > PCI NIC to guarantee it'll work on the first go. He probably gave not > > much more than this for entire used machines. Factor in that you can > > get a brand new mobo/cpu/RAM combo with GbE and GPU today for ~$100 > > USD, and spending any money for just the GbE NIC for the old machine > > seems not a prudent investment. > > David Christensen wrote: > > I agree that it's very hard to justify spending money on obsolete > > hardware. I must have subconsciously assumed the OP had a spare > > Gigabit NIC (I have a couple in my spare parts inventory). > > I agree with all of the above sentiment. Sometimes you just have to > let go of the old hardware. But I was responding to a thread talking > about adding a network card. Maybe I should have said _if_ you are > going to put another network card in the box _then_ stop there. > > Note that it wouldn't need to be a GigE card. It seems to me that any > old 10/100 card should be enough for this machine. I prefer the old > tulip based cards like the Linksys etherfast ones. If you ask around > to your friends or a local user group you can probably find one of > those laying around unused that they would give you for free. And > that removes the cost part from the equation. > > > Without a free NIC, I'd probably: back up the old box (burn to > > optical, use external drive, whatever), build the new box, move the > > old HDD into the new box, and proceed from there. > > Moving the old hard drive to the new machine for a local disk to disk > copy to the new drive should be easy. I guess that depends upon the > vintage of old disk though! But if I had an old 20G disk and had just > bought a new 1T disk then I would certainly simply image the old drive > onto the new one and set the old drive on the shelf as a backup for a > while. > > In other thoughts... I agree that there isn't a reason to upgrade a > particular system from 32-bit to 64-bit. If you have a 32-bit machine > then I can't see any reason to upgrade to a 64-bit machine. I still > have many 32-bit machines. > > However if you are building a new 64-bit machine with today's > inexpensive ram and are putting 8G or more ram into it then I would > definitely recommend using 64-bits for the *new* system given that it > has much more ram in it. The PAE kernels are fine. But nothing is as > simple as a large flat address space. Firefox is quite the pig. I > have routinely killed it on my machine when I have seen that it is up > around 2G in memory size. I think it is only a matter of time before > Firefox will routinely bump against the 3G limit. Especially now that > almost every web site is more Javascript and image intense than > before. Past history being the imperfect predictor of the future. > This will eventually be a 32-bit issue for FF to lean out. But of > course a 64-bit system won't have that limitation. I still would not > recommend (yet) to migrate an existing system from 32-bit to 64-bit. > Maybe for Jessie it will come together however. I think that is > actually very likely for Jessie. > > Bob -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130812234517.ga7...@anthropohedron.net
