Labor Day Weekend made for the perfect time to get my laptop updated.  I know Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) has been out for a while, but I am just now getting it installed.  Here are my notes.

Installation

I didn’t take screenshots of all of the steps.  They were pretty straight forward.  The one thing that I did change was the partitioning.  I read that having the Swap partition on the SSD drive will wear it out, so I went ahead and moved it onto the regular drive.

So, here’s what it looked like:

BackupPC

In previous installs, I was using Duplicity/Deja Dup.  This time, I have been using BackupPC for backups.  It is a nice centralized solution that de-dups and compresses nicely.

Now, to restore… The BackupPC FAQ: SSH Setup is a good place to start.

To troubleshoot, I went to the backuppc server, and ran:

$ ssh pistachio
ssh: connect to host pistachio port 22: Connection refused

That tells me that the ssh server is not installed. So, I ran:

sudo apt-get install ssh

On the BackupPC server, I had already run the keygen. So, I just had to open the id_rsa.pub file and copy it’s contents.

sudo vi /var/lib/backuppc/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Then, on my laptop, I pasted it onto the end of the authorized_keys2 files (which, in my case I had to create):

$ sudo mkdir /root/.ssh
$ sudo vi /root/.ssh/authorized_keys2

Next, I tried to connect to my laptop of the backuppc user on the server:

sudo su - backuppc
sudo ssh root@pistachio

I had to run:

ssh-keygen -f "/var/lib/backuppc/.ssh/known_hosts" -R pistachio

List of Restores

These are the directories that I restored from my backup:

• ~/Documents: This is where I put all my document files
• ~/Pictures: I have Shotwell pointed at this directory, so it contains all the pictures from my cell phone and digital camera
• ~/GideonTaylor: I keep my work files in a different directory
• ~/app: This has all of my programming stuff (“application development”)
• ~/.config/google-chrome-beta: The settings for Chrome (extensions, bookmarks, etc)
• ~/.local/share/keyrings: My saved passwords, see below for more information
• ~/.Skype: Skype history
• ~/.remmina: The settings for my remote connections
• ~/.ssh: The keys for my remote ssh connections
• ~/.local/share/shotwell: The settings and thumbnails for my photos
• ~/.sword: The downloaded Bible files for Xiphos (and the underlying Sword library)
• ~/.filezilla: The settings for my FTP connections
• ~/.sqldeveloper: The connection settings for SQL developer
• ~/.vim: stores the plugins installed in Gvim
• ~/.vimrc: preferences for Gvim  (for my settings, I also had to create the ~/.vimtmp directory)
• /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections: this saves all of my wireless connections and VPN connections
• ~/.VirtualBox: The settings for my virtual machines

Next

From here, you can see all the steps that I took in this series, or the next step is the Utilities and Configuration.

Resources

• BackupPC FAQ: SSH Setup
• SuperUser: Which linux filesystem works best with SSD