On Tuesday 24 September 2002 08:04 pm, Scott Felton wrote: > I have a fairly new install of Mandrake 8.2. If (when) I decide to upgrade > to 9.0 what should I or can I save? Is it easier to start from scratch or > can I save what is in my /home directory? I'm just not sure if eveything in > /home would be compatible with whatever would be installed during an > upgrade to 9.0? > > I have seperate partitions for: > / > /home > /usr > /usr/local > and a 300m swap partition. > > Starting from scratch is not a big issue but I thought I'd get some > opinions and advice. My machine is a "just for fun" workstation.
Scott: The conventional advice is to keep /home, and reformat/rewrite the others. You may end up with some extraneous stuff (but then you're the guy with two 40 gb drives, too), and some settings might need tweaking, but nothing horrendous should occur. You will lose any apps that you've added since the 8.2 install, but that may not be a bad thing, since dependencies and file locations have been known to change from version to version. The Mandrake install does provide an option to upgrade your current installation rather than do a fresh install. Unless this has been greatly improved since I last tried it, don't do it. It takes much, much longer to complete, and you'll probably end up with a lot of stuff that is just taking up space. While I'm sure that upgrading has its advantages in certain situations, for a simple single-user system, a fresh install is usually the best way to proceed. Quicker, too. While you're at it, consider adding a partition that can be used as a storage space (mine's called /archives). You can copy your old /home there, do a completely fresh install, and then just bring back the stuff that's worth saving. Works for me. -- cmg
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