[Novalug] Hosed Ubuntu 11.10 upgrade.. (Igor Birman)

John Place jplace@unixsage.com
Fri Oct 21 14:20:36 EDT 2011


Personally I always do a fresh install between versions. This serves 
several purposes:

1) You are "running with the pack" of fresh installs so problems you 
encounter is not due to some artefact of the system you upgraded. 
Chances are less (not zero) that you will run into a Hardware 
chicken->egg gotchas.

2) Acts as a cleaning event, I tinker a lot so it is kinda serves as a 
level set with each release. I also get to see what the desktop looks 
like on a fresh install...

3) Makes you aware of where your important data is stored and you "test" 
your ability to recover in a timely fashion. The by-product of this is 
better system documention of the tweaks you make so you can reapply on 
the next install.

Typically takes me an hour to bring a fresh system back to the way I 
need it.. Not counting the actual time installing and patching.. It (to 
me at least) is a simple repeatable process. If my hard disk dies the 
process is the same, fresh install and recover my data.

I have 4-5 machines I do this with but 2 main ones my home machine and 
my work machine. I typically do my home machine first and make sure 
there are no major changes that will affect the way I work (gnome 3 was 
a bit of a shock to my process) and then I upgrade my work machine.

Some (most?) would see this as an extreme amount of work I just like the 
fact that the process is the same when installing a new version (common) 
or recovering from a failure since that will happen at the most 
inconvenient time...

Just my 2 cents and as always YMMV :-)

Thanks
John

On 10/21/2011 01:53 PM, Roger W. Broseus wrote:
> upgrades yield non-functional systems
> on older machines




More information about the Novalug mailing list