raymac46 Posted October 30, 2019 Share Posted October 30, 2019 I have a friend in the 'hood who has an old but still capable eMachines desktop in his basement. I installed Linux Mint for him a few years ago to replace Windows XP. He also has a Windows 10 laptop but that is another story. I should probably upgrade his old machine to the latest LM but I am torn. He is one of those unknowledgeable and out of control users. Shortly after I installed Linux Mint and unwisely included WINE with it, he used WINE to set up and run a hopelessly obsolete version of Ancestry's Family Tree Maker. This one wouldn't even run on Windows XP. By now he's likely got gigabytes of family data squirreled away and it'll take hours to find it, back it up and reinstall it after a Linux upgrade. I'm just going to let him run the old Linux version I think. He might get hacked but it isn't likely. When you help people out you can't take total ownership of their situation unless you have control - which I clearly do not in this case. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted October 30, 2019 Share Posted October 30, 2019 Personally, I would clone his harddrive using clonezilla. Then try to do an upgrade to a current version. It may upgrade just fine and it would be worth trying,. If it fails to upgrade, simply restore the clone. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted October 30, 2019 Share Posted October 30, 2019 Also, wine stores its data in ~/.wine so you may be able to just keep his /home partition/folder. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted October 30, 2019 Author Share Posted October 30, 2019 Good suggestions. I probably should have set him up with a separate /home partition in the first place. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hedon James Posted October 30, 2019 Share Posted October 30, 2019 building on SBs suggestion, and assuming you CAN install newer version of Mint, I'd install with a separate /home partition; then mount the clonezilla backup and rsync his old home directory to his new /home partition. a lot of work, but probably save yourself future efforts in the long run. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted October 30, 2019 Share Posted October 30, 2019 My solution would be to change your phone number and possibly move to another city/country. ;) 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted October 30, 2019 Share Posted October 30, 2019 5 hours ago, V.T. Eric Layton said: My solution would be to change your phone number and possibly move to another city/country. Rofl 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raymac46 Posted October 31, 2019 Author Share Posted October 31, 2019 Maybe I should give him Josh's and HJ's email. This is a guy who spent months setting up a massive email database inside Outlook 2003 on the Windows side of things. Most of these emails contain attachments he could just have saved locally. He doesn't want to run any email app except Outlook 2003. I suppose I should be grateful he didn't use Outook Express. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
securitybreach Posted October 31, 2019 Share Posted October 31, 2019 27 minutes ago, raymac46 said: Maybe I should give him Josh's and HJ's email. This is a guy who spent months setting up a massive email database inside Outlook 2003 on the Windows side of things. Most of these emails contain attachments he could just have saved locally. He doesn't want to run any email app except Outlook 2003. I suppose I should be grateful he didn't use Outook Express. Outlook 2003 is not even supported by Microsoft any more: Quote "Outlook 2003 will transition out of extended support on 8th of April 2014" https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/rmilne/2013/10/07/save-the-date-end-of-exchange-2003-supportt-minus-6-months/ So he is probably full of viruses or part of a botnet by now. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
V.T. Eric Layton Posted October 31, 2019 Share Posted October 31, 2019 1 hour ago, securitybreach said: So he is probably full of viruses or part of a botnet by now. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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