Re: Testing Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron)

Conrad Knauer wrote:
> Not only will you be downloading at least a GB of packages you'll only
> use for a few moments, you'll risk conflicts and end up with a system
> that has lots of 'cruft' in your settings.
>
> What I would recommend doing in your case:
>
> - back up ~
> - make note of the non-default install packages you use
> - do a clean install
> - selectively put items back in ~ (e.g. Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.
> hidden directories)
> - install the extra packages you want
> - tweak settings as needed

I keep reading this "backup /home, reinstall, and away you go" thing,
and I think I must be doing things wrong. First, /home should always be
backed up, but that's another matter. The painful part of a fresh
install is making sure I had those mysql db's backed up recently too,
and the apache configs, and that php.ini and the system-wide settings
for vim, and the postfix configs, and the cron jobs, and the ... on and on.

Am I missing some basic admin practices that make this more smooth? I've
played with making a ./configed folder and filling it with symlinks for
every file that I manually edit or adjust, but that becomes cumbersome
and usually abandoned after a while. It's a week of evenings before I'm
back to becoming functional after an install, at best. That's a major
reason I tend to stick with LTS versions of ubuntu - though you'll
definitely feel behind then, unless you manually adjust - the default
firefox for the current LTS version (606) is, I think, 1.5.xx.

Anyone got some great tricks to deal with this? I've actually found
dist-upgrades to be the best upgrade... sometimes. Most often, I just
wait to upgrade when I move to a new box. Start fresh, migrate via the
network, gradually switch to the new machine.
        Les...
Received on Tue Mar 18 23:01:54 2008