I am a big fan of fresh installs. With Mandriva, a new version comes out every six months, and I do a fresh install every six months. My enthusiasm for fresh installs comes purely from a security point of view. Fresh installs mean that at least every six months you *know* you are free of any installed rootkits, loggers, sniffers, and other malware, and you are guaranteed that you are up to date on all your patches.
If you look at the Windows world, one of the reasons that there are millions of zombie machines around is that there are people who installed Windows XP (or even an earlier version) years ago and have been infected with one thing or another for years. They may or may not be up on patches, but patching an infected machine may not cure the problem -- particularly with rootkits, trojans, and polymorphic viruses. If folk in the Windows world did fresh installs every six months -- or every year for that matter -- there would not be nearly as much of a problem. Doing a smart fresh install does not mean that you have to lost data or even reinstall many proprietary apps, if you keep your data and those apps on a different partition. And, in fact, doing a clean install doesn't take much more time than doing an upgrade. billo On Sat, 5 Jun 2010, hard wyrd wrote:
I prefer to do a fresh install than do an upgrade specially if my box is two releases behind. I used Jaunty for well over a year and skipped Karmic Koala. Now I decided to move on to Lucid Lynx. With an unstable connection in my area, there's no way I'm going to risk borking my system just to do an upgrade. Also, have you tried observing which will take longer -- an online upgrade or a fresh install? In Ubuntu and Debian, I can do 'dpkg --get-selections > my-list-of_installed-apps.txt' to save a list of all my apps from an existing install then do the following to put them back on a new install: dpkg --set-selections < /media/USB/my-list-of_installed-apps.txt apt-get dselect-upgrade On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 11:47 PM, Guan Hsu <[email protected]> wrote: I got into this thread a bit late. But this thread, and others like it, highlights the problem for Ubuntu to become widely adapted beyond the enthusiats, even at home, school, small businesses level. If the best advice for upgrade to newer release is to clean up to do a fresh install, it really is not a good practice with someone who actually use the system to do real work: run a business, home school their kids, run a library, etc., not just play with it and play games. There has to be a safer upgrade path and better pratice to allow the work environment to be keep reasonably stable so people can get work done on their computers. Not spending a lot of time reinstalling everything and recover all data on such high regularity. Perhaps Ubuntu should consider the Red Hat/Fedoral model. Keep a rapidly upgrading distro and a stable/well tested distro at two somewhat separate but not mutully exclusive paths. I just updated my CentOS servers from 5.4 to 5.5 without any problem, similar to my many previous upgrades. I like both Red Hat and Ubuntu and think they both have their strength. Just some thoughts! Guan -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Linux Users Group. To post a message, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit our group at http://groups.google.com/group/linuxusersgroup -- ------------------------------------------------------------- "Penguin, penguin, and more penguin !" www.madforubuntu.com baudizm.blogsome.com -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Linux Users Group. To post a message, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit our group at http://groups.google.com/group/linuxusersgroup
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