Trying to reconfigure F9 to new computer hardware... firstboot?

[Dan Thurman]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> Mike wrote:
>> Dan Thurman <dant <at> cdkkt.com> writes:
>>
>>>
>>> What happened was that I spent a lot of time configuring
>>> computer "A", and rsync'd the root filesystem onto disk
>>> at computer "B".  I then rsync'd from hard disk to computer
>>> "C" and everything was fine except that the hardware is
>>> clearly different.
>>
>> I am not sure that copying the root partition from one machine to 
>> another
>> is a good way to install Linux.
>>
>> Was there some special reason not to use one of the normal install 
>> methods
>> from the DVD or Live CD? 
>
> The usual reason for doing this is that you have done extensive 
> configuration and/or installed local or 3rd party software that would 
> take a lot of time to repeat.  Or you just want to know how things 
> will work out if you have to restore from your backups on a new 
> machine.  Or maybe your computer died and you really do have to 
> restore from backups now.
Well said!
>
> Or, you installed under VMware with a different host OS to test 
> usability and now that you know everything works, you want to migrate 
> your working setup to real hardware.
Yup!
>
> It would be _really_ nice if the installer could be re-run in this 
> situation, offering to fix only the things that needed to be fixed 
> (re-detect hardware, build a working initrd, install grub, fix your 
> modprobe.conf and check your fstab and network setup).  You can do 
> this gunk by hand, but it means you have to know as much as anaconda 
> (which doesn't seem to be all that well documented...) about hardware 
> and drivers.  You can sort-of get most of the effect by making /boot a 
> separate partition, doing a basic install on the new hardware, then 
> removing everything except /boot and copying in your old stuff, but 
> that seems unnecessarily cumbersome.
>
Perfect!

Also...

1) To test and see if rsync would work in restoring crashed,
     update-damaged, user or "act of god" missing/destroyed
     filesystem or broken hard disk as a backup/restore method.

2) Clone rsync'd filesystems to other computers to save a LOT
    of time, which remains to be seen.

I discovered that the reason for the text-screen/gui-screen flip-flop
was that I created a new xorg.conf file to reflect the new graphics
hardware and used the Xorg --configure command to create the
xorg.conf file which was placed in ~/xorg.conf.new.

I then copied this file to /etc/X11, rebooted, and there was flip-flopping.

I read on a forum that in F9, you simply do not have to have xorg.conf
in /etc/X11 and xorg would automatically find and setup the graphics.
Ok, so I renamed xorg.conf to xorg.conf.bak, rebooted, and lo and behold!
It worked! So the problem is figuring out how to create a xorg.conf file
that will work properly - although I could just leave it missing in /etc/X11
but what are the consequences in doing that?

Then, I redid the steps 1-4, rebooted and firstboot comes up!

However....

When I got to the last step for "Hardware profiles", it came up with
a blank textbox showing no hardware!  Hmm...  I pressed the "Back"
button hoping that it would redo the hardware profiling - no luck!
So, how can I force a new hardware profiling?

BTW: Ever since I had been rebooting since the first time I rsync'd
root into my partition, HAL failed to start and I have not been able
to get this to work on boot.  When I was fully booted, logged in as
a normal user, became root and issued the command:

/usr/sbin/hald --verbose=yes

hald had started with no errors....  what gives?

All of my services started with no errors except for hal.

So at this point, I am left wondering if all of my hardware
was even detected and updated (which I doubt), the xorg.conf
question, and that the hal daemon fails to start at boot time.
Seems this is all (so far) that I need to resolve.

Any ideas on where I can go from here?

Thanks!
Dan