Thanks to the great helpers here, I have my desktop running pretty close to perfect...
What I want to do now is copy my desktop Mate OS to my laptop. I have not had a lot of luck with copying partitions in Clonezilla...Don't want to try that again, if possible?
I want to copy the Mate partition (which is perfect) on my desktop PC (dual boot wit win10) to:
Mate boot on the laptop...replace the entire OS on laptop with Mate from desktop settings...I am installing Mate on laptop as we "speak".
Any ideas? all responses appreciated (yes, even Clonezilla ones!)
On your desktop computer open the text editor "Pluma" and create a new text file, call it something like "ubuntu-mate-setup-josephus.txt".
Install Ubuntu-Mate on the laptop, from the beginning using an ".iso" file on a usb-drive or optical disc.
"Adjust" the laptop settings one by one until you have replicated the settings of your desktop machine - note everything you "adjust" in your "ubuntu-mate-setup-josephus.txt" file.
When you have finished copy the "ubuntu-mate-setup-josephus.txt" file to the laptop.
In this way you will learn to be in control of your setup, which is a reassuring feeling.
Remember to keep the "ubuntu-mate-setup-josephus.txt" file up to date as you make changes in the future.
alpinejohn, Thank you for your response.
Your 're right..."You might not like this suggestion"
I think...There's gotta be an easier way!
or maybe not. I'll keep your idea in mind, and it's appreciated.
The only easy and 100% working solution is to clone whole drive to a new one. I did it myself ages ago and it just work. I used dd but Clonezilla may work too.
For "approximate" copy I'm using Ubuntu Mate build in backup system. I keep backup on NAS so when I got new laptop I just restored from backup. It pulls all the configs kept in /home etc. but the issue is that it's not copying stuff from /etc (if I remember correctly) co things like configs for apache, nginx, php, hosts etc. had to be redone or moved manually from other machine. Backup also restores SSH keys so you will end up with two machines using the same set of ssh keys.
I have before and can again clone the whole drive with Clonezilla...I won't do that this time for several reasons. As stated in the original, I need to to copy over the Ubuntu partition only, and have it boot from that. I've tried to clone the partition with Clonezilla and that was a disaster.
I'll look into DD and maybe do it that way. Thanks again!
Once upon a time... I had successfully migrated my installation following that path:
Booted source computer from live cd and copied source partition files to usb hdd
Installed fresh system at target computer
Booted target computer from live cd and replaced files in the target partition with source files from usb hdd. Important! Do not overwrite /etc/fstab on the target system!
