New Mobo, no hassle!

Hi all, a few weeks ago the motherboard of my desktop started giving some ageing signals such as not saving BIOS settings (before you ask, I did change the battery, twice actually, probably something is short circuiting the BIOS "feeder"?), not detecting my IDE hard drive and burner and a USB port died. The specs of my desktop:

• Mobo: 5-year-old Gigabyte GA-945GCMX-S2
• CPU: 5-year-old Pentium Dual-Core E2200
• RAM: 4GB DDR2 RAM
• Video: Nvidia Geforce 8400
• Onboard LAN and Sound Cards

Anyway, I spent a few days looking on the web which new mobo to buy (it's not easy to find Mobos for a Pentium Dual Core CPU - LGA 775 in august of 2012!) and I wanted one that supported DDR2 RAM as I didn't want to buy new RAM. Couldn't find a DDR2 compatible one, just DDR3 compatible. So I ended up getting a ASUS P5G41T-M LX2 mobo and two 2GB DDR3 RAM Kingston sticks.

After I made the purchase and while waiting for it to arrive by mail, I started wondering: Do I have to do anything to my Arch Linux setup? Will I have to install new drivers? Will I have to install Arch again? By this time I remembered that if I were using Windows XP I'd have to reinstall everything, or else the system gets plain unusable. A Arch Linux install is something fantastic... to do once! You learn a LOT in the process, but it's something that takes a few hours (more like 4 or 5 hours) to be done.

At this point, I was... desperate! I started googling around and found that Arch was not gonna "feel" anything provided my hard drives were correctly mapped on my /etc/fstab file and that I didn't change architectures (i686 versus x86_64). I already used UUIDs on fstab so that was taken care of and since the CPU was gonna be the same, there was no need to change architectures (I use i686 Arch). I was still not believing it but what choice did I have anyway?

So I took the old mobo out, put on the new one with the new RAM sticks and pressed the power button. Slim booted alright. Logged in to my usual XFCE desktop. When I saw that the network worked without having to install another driver, I knew I was home free. Indeed, everything worked.

So, there you are, another advantage of Linux over Windows: in case you have to change motherboards, no need to reinstall everything! :)

PS: Since I was afraid to have to end up reinstalling Arch, I looked up for the Archbang, which is a preconfigured Arch setup with Openbox as window manager. After installing it you end up with a Arch + Openbox. So, if I had to reinstall Arch, I could just install Archbang, remove Openbox and install XFCE. While doing this little research, I got curious about Openbox and Fluxbox. So I have decided: On my Xubuntu laptop I'll install Fluxbox and on my other laptop I'll remove wattOS R5 and install Archbang. After getting a feeling of these two WMs I'll try to write something here on the blog about them.