Fresh install?

[Thorny]

On Sat, 18 Oct 2008 13:50:56 -0400, Ric Moore wrote:

> On Thu, 2008-10-16 at 10:54 -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:
>> Bruce Marshall wrote:
>> 
>> > On Wednesday 15 October 2008, Derek Broughton wrote:
>> >> > 4) If the upgrade goes bad, you are left with nothing.
>> >>
>> >> How?  It's _never_ happened to me, and I've botched a lot of upgrades
>> >> in the last decade.
>> > 
>> > So software never breaks?  I admit that when it happened to me it was
>> > with SuSE long ago, but I'm not about to risk that again.
>> 
>> Of course software breaks, and I've had it break badly enough that it's
>> taken _days_ to get the system working again.  I haven't, however, ever
>> had an upgrade break badly enough that I'm "left with nothing". --
>> derek
> 
> OTOH, it consumes a lot of brain cells during that process that many are
> just not up to. When I tried updating to FC5 from FC4 UDEV broke horribly
> and it seemed I was the only one experiencing the problem. I filed
> bugzilla and no resolution came of it. In the end, I re-installed cleanly
> and the problem went away. (It took udev about 5 minutes to churn on
> bootup and it made me crazy in short order)  Plus, I find a clean install
> to be quicker from DVD than eating up my satellite. If you're fortunate
> enough to have a fat pipe, an upgrade would make more sense. But to those
> in rural areas with nothing more than a 56k modem connection, upgrading
> would take forever and be highly prone to breakage from interruptions.
> Jus' my two-cents worth, Ric

Being one of those out here in a rural area with only access to a dialup,
I can say you are correct, it sucks. I usually option the package manager
to download only and then, several days later, when all the necessary debs
have downloaded, I upgrade. That avoids interruption breakage but it's
still slooooooow. From out here, it seems to me that *everyone* else has
that fat pipe. :-( I suppose we all will eventually. Some of my friends
are accustomed to me showing up to leach from their router.