going from 8.04 to 9.10

[Sascha Güthling]

On 10/7/09, O. Sinclair <o.sinclair at gmail.com> wrote:
> Christopher Rob JONES wrote:
>  >> This is what it took for me, about a week. You have to fully update each
>  >> install before you can make the jump to the next. Sorry. Ric
>  >
>  > I think if I was in your shoes I would consider a completely fresh
>  > installation. backup /home to an external drive or similar, do a fresh
>  > installation, including reformatting home, and then just copy back the
>  > data from the /home backup. I think you should probably let the various
>  > config files (.XYZ etc.) remake themselves since the differences are
>  > likely large, particular for KDE going fronm 3 to 4.
>  >
>  > just my 2 pence worth.
>  >
>  > Chris
>  >
>
> the only parts of the above that worries me is IF they said config
>  files, mail files etc will remake themselves if left in the KDE3 places.

You could easily try out by backing up your /home to an external
storage, then leaving the data on the original partition make a fresh
install of Karmic and see what happens.

But I think they will not be converted but rather overwritten or the
new files will be in a different place and the old files ignored by
the system.

Unfortunately sometimes you have to break with things to make
something new. I think it's better than dragging the old junk around
with you for backwards compatibility till forever. But that is a
different discussion.

To answer some of your other questions:

Ext4 is still in development. I can't cite but I've seen tests where
the performance was very similar to ext3 in terms of speed. Mostly
depending on the file size you have some little advantages here or
there. That was 2 or 3 months ago.
Being in development also means there can still be errors, you should
probably read up on the state of the development. I had no problems so
far on my Karmic test installation.

But if you decide to change your /home from ext3 to ext4 you won't
have any trouble getting your data back on the new partition. It's
like copying something on a USB thumb drive, most of them are still
FAT32 and you don't have any trouble getting your data back from them.

If you decide to leave your /home partition as ext3 and your /root
partition changes to ext4 you won't have problems either. They can
coexist with each other (and other types) peacefully. The system
doesn't care.

-- 

Sascha