[ale] Well, this is More Fun than I thought

[Charles Shapiro]

Finally decided to bite the bullet and upgrade my main desktop from Debian
8 to Debian 10. It had been a shameful two years since my last full
upgrade.  Followed the Path of Least Resistance.  The original machine had
a 1/2 TB drive partitioned into 8 gb of OS space, 18 gb of Swap, and the
rest /home.  I was seriously running out of root and tmp space.  I've only
filled up about 150 GB of my /home partition.  I've got 12 GB of memory in
this thing and I don't come close to using that up.

So I hopped down to my friendly neighborhood Micro Center and picked up a
120 gb SSD for a laughable $18. The hardest part of the hardware
installation was squinching the data cable into the connector on the side
of the motherboard.  BIOS recognized it right away.  A far cry from the Bad
Old Days of fiddling with jumpers and entering cylinders/heads/sectors.

I partitioned half the SSD as OS and half as /tmp.  lvm made it a Snap to
use my old swap and mount my old /home partition.  I stopped NetworkManager
and configured my static IP manually in /etc/network/interfaces.  There's
an /etc/network/interfaces.d directory which is probably the Right Way to
do this, but I couldn't find good directions on what should go in there.
Of course I had to copy over the new .kde directory to get menus and stuff
to workee.  It did take me almost 20 minutes to find the correct place to
configure my mouse to left-handed in the amazing new KDE Plasma WM, which
is a Maze of Twisty Little Passages.

Sound worked right out of the box on my ancient SoundBlaster Audigy 2.
Most of what I had to do was apt-get install a bunch of software.  My CIFS
mount to my backup server had to have a version option added to it, and one
of my devices uses an outdated ssh key exchange algorithm that had to be
accounted for in ${HOME}/.ssh/profile.  Also I discovered that firefox
apparently decides what kind of file it's looking at by the extension;
restoring /tmp/bookmarks didn't work, but the same file named
/tmp/bookmarks.jsonlz4 did.   Looks like it deleted it after it was through
also. Wow.

Still have some minor/major video Stuff to work through, as when the new
system returns from Lock it is in a weird and almost illegible mode.  Other
than that, it's mostly been easy-peasy config stuff like wallpaper.  Now I
am finally on Python 3.7.  W00t.

-- CHS
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