Changing how Linux Mint identifies network devices

I've been running Linux Mint 17.2 (mostly) happily on my old 2007 Thinkpad T61p.  However, even with 8GB of RAM and a SSD, it was a bit too sluggish for my tastes.  So I purchased a used T530 which is about 5-6 years newer and has an i7 CPU.

Swapping the SSD from one unit to the other was easy, and Linux Mint booted right up.  But I couldn't get a network connection (wired or wireless).

Troubleshooting step #1 was to boot up the Linux Mint 17.2 DVD and see whether it could see the network.  It saw both the wired ethernet port as well as the Thinkpad's WiFi.  So that indicated that there was no problem with the hardware and that Mint does support the Thinkpad network chips out-of-the-box.

Rebooted into the installed operating system.  I poked around a bit, then decided to just search /etc for any files containing 'eth0'.

# find /etc -type f -exec grep -H 'eth0' '{}' \;

That quickly lead me to the /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules file.  Inside of there are lines that map the device (using the MAC) to names like 'eth0' 'eth1'.  Because this was a drive swap from the old to the new laptop, the old laptop's ethernet/wifi ports were in there already as eth0/wlan0.  Linux Mint then added new lines for the devices on the new laptop as eth1/wlan1.

The simple fix was to comment out the old SUBSYSTEM= lines, then change the NAME="" strings to be eth0 and wlan0.

After a reboot, everything worked as expected, without having to change anything else.

Switching Linux Mint on Thinkpad T61p

I've been wanting to try and switch to Linux full-time on my home desktop/laptop machines for a while, and the amount of spyware / tracking / report back in Windows 10 is pushing me to make a real effort this year.  So, I'm taking my old Thinkpad T61p and putting Linux Mint 17.2 on it.  My requirements were:

• Full disk encryption
• Virtualization for a Win7 or Win10 guest
• Running as much as possible inside of Linux
• 64bit OS

A lot of my day-to-day software is already multi-platform or open-source.  For instance:

• Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome for web browsing
• Mozilla Thunderbird for email
• SVN or git for version control
• GPG for encryption
• Pidgin for instant messaging and IRC
• Audacity, Handbrake, VLC for multimedia work
• About half of my Steam games are Linux / SteamOS
• OpenVPN
• pgAdmin III
• Synergy

The troublesome applications will be:

• Microsoft Office is iffy under WINE
• Microsoft Access does not run under WINE
• Skype might be a problem
• ODBC connections for use with MSAccess
• The half of my Steam games that are not cross-platform
• Cisco AnyConnect VPN client for access to my virtual servers

Because I'm doing this on my old laptop (until the T550p comes out later this year), I'm not too worried about video games that won't run under Steam for Linux.  The only games that this old Core2Duo system will support are the lighterweight / older games that don't need much CPU or video graphics performance.