many questions prior hardy upgrade (clean install)

[Paul Gear]

Sebastian Spiess wrote:
> ...
> 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 :-)

I hope i have some that are helpful.  :-)

>    - 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?

Yes - probably slightly more than that if i remember correctly.  I think
there has to be room for a little bit of state information, but i can't
remember where i heard that.

> What is your experience with hibernating? (not stand-by) I have a Toshiba satellite P100 if that matters.

I tried hibernate once on my Dell Latitude D830 w/- 4 GB RAM, and it was
so slow, i swore never to do it again.  Your situation may be different,
but i found it too slow to be feasible - it was quicker to reboot than
to hibernate.  I use suspend all the time and it works OK.  A couple of
times i've had problems, and if that's the case i just force a reboot.

>    - 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)
>    - 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?

I can't think why anyone would want separate partitions for anything
except /home, especially on a laptop where space is more likely to be at
a premium.  My laptop has 2 partitions: /boot, and encrypted LVM.  In
the encrypted LVM are only root and swap, nothing else.

>    - 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?

In terms of software, i suspect deborphan and debfoster are probably the
tools you're looking for.  Also, keep a copy of the output of 'dpkg
--get-selections'.

> 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...

For the applications that you use regularly, you'd be better to keep
what you've got i think.  If anything, all of /home would be what i
would keep.

> 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?

I've never found that to make much difference.

>    - 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?

I use encrypted LVM with a nice long passphrase.  After years of reading
Bruce Schneier, i don't have much confidence in fingerprint readers and
the like, and even encrypted hard disks have been cracked through a
memory scanning technique now:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/02/cold_boot_attac.html

Paul

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