many questions prior hardy upgrade (clean install)

Sebastian Spiess sebastian.spiess at gmail.com
Mon Apr 28 14:42:23 BST 2008


hi there,

I want to do some changes to partition sizes and a clean install with hardy on my notebook which runs feisty by now.
Before I start my upgrade to hardy I have some questions and I am hoping for answers :-)

   - By now my root dir is 5.2 GB big and now after a year filled to 3.6GB. I thought of reducing it by at least 500MB.
These 500MB I would then add to my swap (by now 512MB)

   - In total I want to increase my swap to 1024mb so that I can use hibernating on my laptop. I have 1GB ram so when I am 
correct I need 1GB of swap space to hibernate, correct?
What is your experience with hibernating? (not stand-by) I have a Toshiba satellite P100 if that matters.

   - By now my /home partition is 6GB and full, so there is no way to fit that on a single layer DVD for backup reasons So 
I will increase its size as well.

   - What are your recommendations about moving other parts to separate partitions? /tmp, /var or to much hassle?

   - Although I want to do a clean install to get rid of the debris of my initial "getting familiar with ubuntu" period I 
would like to keep as many settings as possible. But how can I select needed from not needed?
What about starting with a clean /home and then copy everything from the backup as needed? This would probably cause some 
trouble with evolution/amarok/f-spot...
Especially with Firefox I've read that 'starting over' can increase stability quite a bit. So what about exporting 
bookmarks and blocklist and settings and then install all add-ons new instead of copying the whole profile over?

   - By now I downloaded the alternate install CD and I was thinking about making use of the encryption feature? are USB 
fingerprint reader (thinkfinger) supported? Any experience? What about using a USB dongle with gpg key?

Cheers, Sebastian

A note regarding the migration assistant: I've used the assistant when I installed feisty to import everything into a 
'windows' profile. By now I don't even know the password for this profile and I never logged in to use it. I migrated 
Firefox and Thunderbird myself and off I went.



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