My wife's PC has been around for a few years, and I had a newer PC that I wanted to move her onto. Problem was, her old PC only had IDE connectors for the HD, and the replacement only had SATA.

Being a linux guy, I whipped out an old removable USB hd I had lying around, and booted up the replacement PC off of an Ubutnu 9.10 CD I keep around for just such purposes, and i used gparted to clone a copy of the replacement PC's HD off to the USB HD. So the replacement PC is now ready to serve as a true replacement.

On her old PC, I fired up an Ubuntu 10 CD, only because I had a separate Ubuntu 10 CD lying around, and for some strange reason, gparted on the Ubuntu 10 CD bombs. Anyhow this ain't about gparted. So I googled up "copy hard disk over network" and found this: http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/howto-copy-compressed-drive-image-over-network.html and it did the trick. But here are the specifics I used which actually worked:

Both source (her old PC) and target (the newer pc) are booted up using an Ubuntu 9 or 10 LiveCD. On both PCs I fire up a terminal session

and I enter a new password for root. I can't tell for sure if you do or don't need to do this. I'm just telling what worked for me. So I now have a root terminal session fired up on both source and target PCs.

Let's say the target PC's IP address is 192.168.0.10. Also, let's say I used gparted on both the source and target to look at the disks, and I determine that /dev/sda is the disk I want to copy on the SOURCE PC, and /dev/sdb is the disk I want to overwrite on the TARGET PC. Very important.

On the TARGET PC, in that terminal session, I issue the following:

So I see netcat fire up and it says it's listening on port 2222.

On the SOURCE PC, in that terminal session, I issue the following:

And it looks like this:

Okay,here is where patience kicked in. I started in 3:00 pm in the afternoon, and it wasn't done until the next morning! Was it the "bs=16M" in the dd command? Both computers were going at gig speed on the NICs. The disk was 80gb, so that'll give you an idea. But you know what? It worked! I rebooted the new PC, and Vista fired up. Awesome.

Did a clean install of Ubuntu Server 8.10. Configured to run only print server and Samba. All went well until the install was done and the new system fired up. Can't login at all. Only way to login is to reboot and use the recovery console. Which I did. Decided to upgrade the distro to the latest Ubuntu, which I did. Still can't login.

Finally, the fix.

Do that and unselect the "SMB password synchronization". Reboot and all is well.

On my Ubuntu Studio workstation, I've added in a generic DV capture card, one with a firewire (1394) interface on it. Getting it to work with kino, however has proven to be somewhat of a pain. This is mostly here now for my own recollection in the future.

This worked for me. I cannot say it will work for anybody else, nor do I even begin to claim to have any "how-to" suggestions beyond what you read here and now. So here is how I got it to work:

• Connect camcorder's DV output to the DV capture card, and power up the camcorder
• Reboot the workstation with the camera powered up
• After reboot, log on as ordinary user
• Fire up a terminal session
• Issue the following commands:
modprobe raw1394
gksudo kino

• Yes, this means it has to run as root. You will likely be prompted to re-enter your credentials, so do it.
• Kino will fire up. Under Edit > Preferences > IEEE 1394, you should now see your DV device.
• It still took some fiddling around with the display settings and what-not, but the device will work if you keep at it.

And that's how I got it to work.