As we know when I upgraded everything last month I just put the disks back in with the new boards and just booted everything up and they just ran. I didn't reinstall either of the two new ones that I currently have running, serverpc and mediapc.
However as neither of these computers is able to hibernate, I have started reinstalling serverpc to see if I can get it to hibernate, and if this works, mediapc, which for some reason won't hibernate at the moment, will be reinstalled as well.
Both will be installed with KDE on Debian 9.6 , and reinstallation is not a really big job as neither of them has a lot of software installed, as those two are mainly used for specialised tasks.
Also it's been a useful time to get serverpc to be able to access all of its SSD swap space which is over 100 GB which will come in useful when doing really big jobs that exceed the 32 GB of memory that it has installed.
Hibernation in Debian seems to be quite reliable, and is enabled by default, one of my reasons for choosing it over Ubuntu or its variants, which have hibernation disabled by default. However there seem to be more issues with hibernation not working well when KDE is the desktop environment, compared to my experience with XFCE.
I would have installed mediapc first, since it doesn't have KDE at the moment, but as it doing the backups at the moment it is just easier to do serverpc first and then do mediapc later. I decided to leave serverpc's name as serverpc, and mediapc will stay with that name as well.
It is good that I don't need to enable UEFI on the two new boards as due to my negative experience with UEFI on Linux on the old serverpc, I am sticking to everything being BIOS for the time being. The exception being the NUC which remains UEFI.
The first attempt to hibernate on serverpc was a failure and the desktop environment would not load properly on resume so I flashed the BIOS with the latest version. This had the useful effect of getting rid of all the ACPI error messages at boot. It's interesting the BIOS was already at the second to latest version (Gigabyte F9) and putting it to the latest (F10) got rid of all those ACPI errors. There have been about six revisions of the BIOS for this computer and I was fully expecting to have quite an old version on this two year old board as it is so easy for the manufacturer to not bother updating the firmware at the factory and leave it to a user to fix.
To finish reinstalling serverpc I need to re-enable the root logon (which I haven't got around to doing on mainpc) to be able to get the RAID array online with my user profile so that is one step to be completed. However while resume from hibernation seems to be retrieving application data the KDE desktop environment often does not seem to be reloading properly as instead of the menus etc all you get is a black screen. This is obviously very odd and something I need to do more investigation into as regards KDE. However it seems to be a common issue and maybe it will be easy to resolve.
