Re: [ubuntu-uk] Upgrade vs Reinstall
2009/5/13 Dean Sas d...@deansas.org: On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 04:29, Liam Proven lpro...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/5/12 Alan Pope a...@popey.com: 2009/5/12 Liam Proven lpro...@gmail.com: The key thing is to keep your /home directory tree on a separate partition. That makes re-installing much less painful and fiddly. Not really. You can reinstall over the top these days and it will wipe everything except /home - even if it's all on one partition. This gives you the benefit that having /home in a separate partition has, but with the added benefit of not having to maintain extra partitions, and the possibility of having space in the wrong part. Not for everyone, some people like separate partitions for /home, just pointing out you don't have to, to get that benefit. Oh, really? I didn't know about that. When did it come in what's it called? I'd like to go and do some digging and reading... Hardy. See https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/ubiquity-preserve-home for detail. Dean Thanks! -- Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lpro...@gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 • Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven • LiveJournal/Twitter: lproven MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • ICQ: 73187508 -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Upgrade vs Reinstall
On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 04:29, Liam Proven lpro...@gmail.com wrote: 2009/5/12 Alan Pope a...@popey.com: 2009/5/12 Liam Proven lpro...@gmail.com: The key thing is to keep your /home directory tree on a separate partition. That makes re-installing much less painful and fiddly. Not really. You can reinstall over the top these days and it will wipe everything except /home - even if it's all on one partition. This gives you the benefit that having /home in a separate partition has, but with the added benefit of not having to maintain extra partitions, and the possibility of having space in the wrong part. Not for everyone, some people like separate partitions for /home, just pointing out you don't have to, to get that benefit. Oh, really? I didn't know about that. When did it come in what's it called? I'd like to go and do some digging and reading... Hardy. See https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/ubiquity-preserve-home for detail. Dean -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Upgrade vs Reinstall
2009/5/12 doug livesey biot...@gmail.com: Hi -- I was just wondering, why it is that the community-at-large seems to think that it is better to reinstall to a newer version of Ubuntu rather than to run the upgrade? What makes you think they do? Perhaps these people are used to Windows/Fedora/Red Hat where upgrading in the past has been notoriously unreliable? Cheers, Al. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Upgrade vs Reinstall
I wouldn't say that upgrading is unreliable in Windows - a clean install is always a better option, and technically safer, but upgrading is also quite reliable. James On 12 May 2009, at 11:53, Alan Pope a...@popey.com wrote: 2009/5/12 doug livesey biot...@gmail.com: Hi -- I was just wondering, why it is that the community-at-large seems to think that it is better to reinstall to a newer version of Ubuntu rather than to run the upgrade? What makes you think they do? Perhaps these people are used to Windows/Fedora/Red Hat where upgrading in the past has been notoriously unreliable? Cheers, Al. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/ -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Upgrade vs Reinstall
2009/5/12 Alan Pope a...@popey.com: 2009/5/12 doug livesey biot...@gmail.com: Hi -- I was just wondering, why it is that the community-at-large seems to think that it is better to reinstall to a newer version of Ubuntu rather than to run the upgrade? What makes you think they do? Perhaps these people are used to Windows/Fedora/Red Hat where upgrading in the past has been notoriously unreliable? For what it's worth, I've just ran the upgrade myself and it appears painless so far... -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Upgrade vs Reinstall
Hi -- I was just wondering, why it is that the community-at-large seems to think that it is better to reinstall to a newer version of Ubuntu rather than to run the upgrade? I'm personally an 'install from fresh' person, but that's just me ;) Otherwise, I heard two anecdotal stories at a recent LUG meeting of people upgrading to Jaunty and it taking several hours. In fact, one person re-did it from fresh on their machine at the meet and it took about 35mins. Any thoughts on this? Robert. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Upgrade vs Reinstall
2009/5/12 Robert Longstaff dreamf...@dreamfish.org.uk: Hi -- I was just wondering, why it is that the community-at-large seems to think that it is better to reinstall to a newer version of Ubuntu rather than to run the upgrade? I'm personally an 'install from fresh' person, but that's just me ;) Otherwise, I heard two anecdotal stories at a recent LUG meeting of people upgrading to Jaunty and it taking several hours. In fact, one person re-did it from fresh on their machine at the meet and it took about 35mins. Any thoughts on this? The upgrade I just did downloaded over a gig worth of data, but as I'm on a fast connection the entire install was complete in about 30-40 minutes. If I was on a slower connection I would probably have been better off using a cd instead. On the other hand, f I had less installed on this computer then it would have been quicker again. Generally, if my machine is working nicely I'll just upgrade. If I've installed a lot of crud or otherwise broken things then I'll go for a fresh install. I certainly don't see the need for a fresh install each time. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Upgrade vs Reinstall
Well, then I stand corrected! ;) When I installed Ibex on my Macbook, there was loads of buggering around in the config files to get things like the touchpad scrolling working, and loads of sound issues, and other things which I don't recall just to hand. Which is fair enough, as there's a hell of a lot of machines out there, and you can't configure everything to run out of the box on everything. But could an upgrade rather than a reinstall save me some of that hassle? Cheers, Doug. 2009/5/12 Lucy lucybrid...@gmail.com 2009/5/12 Robert Longstaff dreamf...@dreamfish.org.uk: Hi -- I was just wondering, why it is that the community-at-large seems to think that it is better to reinstall to a newer version of Ubuntu rather than to run the upgrade? I'm personally an 'install from fresh' person, but that's just me ;) Otherwise, I heard two anecdotal stories at a recent LUG meeting of people upgrading to Jaunty and it taking several hours. In fact, one person re-did it from fresh on their machine at the meet and it took about 35mins. Any thoughts on this? The upgrade I just did downloaded over a gig worth of data, but as I'm on a fast connection the entire install was complete in about 30-40 minutes. If I was on a slower connection I would probably have been better off using a cd instead. On the other hand, f I had less installed on this computer then it would have been quicker again. Generally, if my machine is working nicely I'll just upgrade. If I've installed a lot of crud or otherwise broken things then I'll go for a fresh install. I certainly don't see the need for a fresh install each time. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/ -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Upgrade vs Reinstall
Lucy lucybrid...@gmail.com: The upgrade I just did downloaded over a gig worth of data, but as I'm on a fast connection the entire install was complete in about 30-40 minutes. If I was on a slower connection I would probably have been better off using a cd instead. On the other hand, f I had less installed on this computer then it would have been quicker again. Tallies with my own experience. I wasn't timing it, but I shouldn't think it took much more than half an hour over my broadband connection. I had to fiddle the initrd to get it to boot off my RAID array, but that wasn't exactly unexpected. Apart from that it was quite painless. jim -- Jim Cameron Software Engineer Buhler Sortex Limited Research and Development Department 20 Atlantis Avenue London E16 2BF Registered in England No. 434274 T +44(0)20 7055 7607 F +44(0)20 7055 7701 Mail to: jim.came...@buhlersortex.com www.buhlersortex.com This e-mail (including any attachments) is confidential, may be legally privileged and is designated exclusively for the intended recipient. Access by any other person is not authorised. Any disclosure of this e-mail or of names of persons mentioned therein as well as any storing, copying, distribution and dissemination is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please immediately delete this e-mail and notify the sender by phone or by e-mail. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Upgrade vs Reinstall
I'm not very good with upgrades and things, so I was really pleased when I upgraded using the upgrade tool, to find that it worked perfectly too. I was kind of dreading it, with my past experience with messing things up, but I was very impressed. John. jim.came...@buhlersortex.com wrote: Lucy lucybrid...@gmail.com: The upgrade I just did downloaded over a gig worth of data, but as I'm on a fast connection the entire install was complete in about 30-40 minutes. If I was on a slower connection I would probably have been better off using a cd instead. On the other hand, f I had less installed on this computer then it would have been quicker again. Tallies with my own experience. I wasn't timing it, but I shouldn't think it took much more than half an hour over my broadband connection. I had to fiddle the initrd to get it to boot off my RAID array, but that wasn't exactly unexpected. Apart from that it was quite painless. jim -- Jim Cameron Software Engineer Buhler Sortex Limited Research and Development Department 20 Atlantis Avenue London E16 2BF Registered in England No. 434274 T +44(0)20 7055 7607 F +44(0)20 7055 7701 Mail to: jim.came...@buhlersortex.com www.buhlersortex.com This e-mail (including any attachments) is confidential, may be legally privileged and is designated exclusively for the intended recipient. Access by any other person is not authorised. Any disclosure of this e-mail or of names of persons mentioned therein as well as any storing, copying, distribution and dissemination is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please immediately delete this e-mail and notify the sender by phone or by e-mail. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Upgrade vs Reinstall
2009/5/12 Lucy lucybrid...@gmail.com: 2009/5/12 Robert Longstaff dreamf...@dreamfish.org.uk: Hi -- I was just wondering, why it is that the community-at-large seems to think that it is better to reinstall to a newer version of Ubuntu rather than to run the upgrade? I'm personally an 'install from fresh' person, but that's just me ;) Otherwise, I heard two anecdotal stories at a recent LUG meeting of people upgrading to Jaunty and it taking several hours. In fact, one person re-did it from fresh on their machine at the meet and it took about 35mins. Any thoughts on this? The upgrade I just did downloaded over a gig worth of data, but as I'm on a fast connection the entire install was complete in about 30-40 minutes. If I was on a slower connection I would probably have been better off using a cd instead. On the other hand, f I had less installed on this computer then it would have been quicker again. Generally, if my machine is working nicely I'll just upgrade. If I've installed a lot of crud or otherwise broken things then I'll go for a fresh install. I certainly don't see the need for a fresh install each time. What Lucy said. If you have a clean system, with few extra apps installed or standard ones removed, that you've not hand-installed custom drivers on, built some bits from source, hand-edited your config files and so on - then the upgrade should go fine. Between 4.04 and 7.10 I reinstalled from scratch at least 2 or 3 times. But this time, I tried the upgrade, and it worked fine. This was a clean install of 8.10, but I've mucked about with it quite a lot and it still worked. I'm pleasantly impressed. My notebook has even gone from 8.04 to 8.10 to 9.04 with no major issues. Flash stopped working when I was running the beta of 9.04 but by the release version it was fine. I think part of the reason is that Ubuntu is quite mature now and so is changing less and less between versions. The only things I can spot different post-upgrade are a newer version of Pidgin and the Ayatana-notifyOSD notifications in the top right corner. I'm sure more's different under the covers but it's not immediately apparent. In general: The key thing is to keep your /home directory tree on a separate partition. That makes re-installing much less painful and fiddly. Windows 7 has made some leaps and bounds in this department - now there is an option to reinstall on an existing partition, while preserving its contents. Before, it wiped \WINDOWS and mixed old and new entries in \Program Files and \Documents and Settings. Now, Win7 archives all the old stuff into \WINDOWS.OLD and builds a new system from scratch in the root directory. You can then manually retrieve what you want from your old directories, then bin them. This is a step towards Mac OS X's Archive Install option, which leaves all your user settings (in /users rather than /home) and applications (in /Programs) intact but archives all the system boot, Unix binaries and settings directories into Previous Systems for you to root through and delete later. This would be a good feature for Ubuntu to copy sometime, I reckon. -- Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lpro...@gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 • Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven • LiveJournal/Twitter: lproven MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • ICQ: 73187508 -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Upgrade vs Reinstall
2009/5/12 Liam Proven lpro...@gmail.com: The key thing is to keep your /home directory tree on a separate partition. That makes re-installing much less painful and fiddly. Not really. You can reinstall over the top these days and it will wipe everything except /home - even if it's all on one partition. This gives you the benefit that having /home in a separate partition has, but with the added benefit of not having to maintain extra partitions, and the possibility of having space in the wrong part. Not for everyone, some people like separate partitions for /home, just pointing out you don't have to, to get that benefit. This is a step towards Mac OS X's Archive Install option, which leaves all your user settings (in /users rather than /home) and applications (in /Programs) intact but archives all the system boot, Unix binaries and settings directories into Previous Systems for you to root through and delete later. This would be a good feature for Ubuntu to copy sometime, I reckon. There is talk (and prototypes) of an inplace upgrade which is reversible. You do the upgrade in a test mode which mounts the filesystem in such a way that changes are written temporarily, in such a way that you can undo it, taking you right back to your state before the upgrade. It's quite a neat way to do upgrades, but rough round the egdes at the moment. Cheers, Al. -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Upgrade vs Reinstall
Hi all I have upgraded all the way from Warty to Jaunty with no problems due to the upgrade process going wrong. Cheers Tony -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Upgrade vs Reinstall
2009/5/12 Tony Pursell a...@princeswalk.fsnet.co.uk: Hi all I have upgraded all the way from Warty to Jaunty with no problems due to the upgrade process going wrong. Cheers Tony *Boggle* Wow! Well, I'm impressed! -- Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lpro...@gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 • Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven • LiveJournal/Twitter: lproven MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • ICQ: 73187508 -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
Re: [ubuntu-uk] Upgrade vs Reinstall
2009/5/12 Alan Pope a...@popey.com: 2009/5/12 Liam Proven lpro...@gmail.com: The key thing is to keep your /home directory tree on a separate partition. That makes re-installing much less painful and fiddly. Not really. You can reinstall over the top these days and it will wipe everything except /home - even if it's all on one partition. This gives you the benefit that having /home in a separate partition has, but with the added benefit of not having to maintain extra partitions, and the possibility of having space in the wrong part. Not for everyone, some people like separate partitions for /home, just pointing out you don't have to, to get that benefit. Oh, really? I didn't know about that. When did it come in what's it called? I'd like to go and do some digging and reading... -- Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lpro...@gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 • Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AOL/AIM/iChat/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven • LiveJournal/Twitter: lproven MSN: lpro...@hotmail.com • ICQ: 73187508 -- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
