Recently, the filesystem on my trusty Dell D820 laptop started having some problems. It’s using btrfs and installed back when btrfs first showed up, so I am no too surprised that something happend with it. Side note: Josef (btrfs maintainer extraordinaire) has been absolutely great in helping track down and fix it, see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=726814 for the nitty-gritty.
So, I decided at least for now to move to another laptop here (thinkpad t510). First order of business was to add memory and replace the 1600×900 screen with a nice 1920×1080 one. This went very smoothly. The lcd replacement was easy and made a gigantic difference. My D820 has a 1920×1200 screen in it, and I really didn’t want to move to too much smaller resolution. The higher resolution screen on the 510 also looks MUCH nicer: brighter colors, crisper and all around more pleasant.
Since the filesystem corruption was preventing me from just mass copying everything off the old machine, I just synced over a small list of things I needed: ssh keys, keepassxdb, xchat logs/settings, midori browser history.
This gave me a great chance to (re)setup my mail and it’s filtering. I’m a long time claws-mail user, and adding filters is pretty easy. So easy that I had added tons of them over the years. Seeing my full flood of email to my main mbox gave me a chance to look at things and ask: do I read this? Should I unsubscribe from this list? Do I need to save logwatch emails from my home machines? Do I care when something is auto-discarded from mailman? After just a few days I pretty much had everything filtering away, and in much better shape than I had things before. So, this might actually end up being something I try and do once a year or so: Drop all my filters and re-check my incoming emails for what really matters.
F16 prerelease is running great on the Thinkpad. Everything works out of the box. In fact aside from an anoying glibc resolver bug (which I am running a patched glibc for), this release is looking quite stable and boring so far. 😉