I recently replaced my 2013 Dell XPS 13 with a 2018 Dell XPS 13. This was a very smooth transition, but I thought it was worth publishing some notes on the process.\u00a0 Yes, users of Real Operating Systems are probably laughing, and I wish Ubuntu had a migration tool as nice as Apple’s (assuming theirs still works).\u00a0 But if you’re like me and choose to use a penguin-themed operating system, you might find these notes useful.<\/p>\n
This isn’t meant to be a proper HOWTO, more of a list of notes to myself for the next time I do this.<\/p>\n
I didn’t even need to migrate my \/etc directory.\u00a0 OK my printer config vanished, but that was easy enough to set up again.<\/p>\n
To do all of those steps I\u00a0followed\u00a0these instructions<\/a>.\u00a0 There were some weird packages installed on the old machine that it couldn’t find, but none of them really seemed to make a difference.\u00a0 The new machine was working as of the very first reboot, with the following one major issue, and a few minor issues.<\/p>\n YIKES.\u00a0 This was not fun to discover. I quickly saw that my new Dell XPS 13 (9370) Laptop running Ubuntu 18.04 was draining battery while sleeping (suspended), at least 5% per hour.\u00a0 It also felt warm even after having been “asleep” for hours.\u00a0 It turns out this is a problem with the default sleep method being set wrong.\u00a0 The default is set to “s2idle” when “deep” is the right answer.\u00a0 See this AskUbuntu post<\/a> for details about how to check for and fix this problem.<\/p>\n By default, the new touchpad uses two fingers to right click instead of the right side of the pad.\u00a0 I decided to revert back to what I was used to be changing a setting:<\/p>\n The mouse cursor has always been the bane of my existence.\u00a0 I like the DMZ-Black cursor instead of the default white.\u00a0 For some reason there are two places where the mouse cursor theme is set.\u00a0 One is in GNOME settings, but the other is system-wide.\u00a0 So I needed to use gnome-tweaks, and then also:<\/p>\n And then reboot.<\/p>\n Because I hadn’t copied my \/etc directory I had to reinstall my printer software.<\/p>\n On the whole the migration was very uneventful.\u00a0 I realize that I have a major advantage, being comfortable with Debian systems and apt commands and rsync, and not everyone can or wants to put up with this kind of procedure.\u00a0 But for an operating system that is still lousy on the desktop, it actually works pretty nicely and is pleasant to use.\u00a0 Here’s to another 5 years before I need to do this again!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I recently replaced my 2013 Dell XPS 13 with a 2018 Dell XPS 13. This was a very smooth transition, but I thought it was worth publishing some notes on the process.\u00a0 Yes, users of Real Operating Systems are probably laughing, and I wish Ubuntu had a migration tool as nice as Apple’s (assuming theirs … Continue reading “Upgrading a Laptop: a few notes”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ywwg.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1858"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ywwg.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ywwg.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ywwg.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ywwg.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1858"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ywwg.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1861,"href":"https:\/\/ywwg.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1858\/revisions\/1861"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ywwg.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ywwg.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ywwg.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Issues<\/h2>\n
Major Issue: Battery Drain During Sleep<\/h3>\n
Touchpad<\/h3>\n
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad click-method areas<\/pre>\n
Mouse Cursor<\/h3>\n
sudo update-alternatives --config x-cursor-theme<\/pre>\n
Printer<\/h3>\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n