Better way to install/upgrade?

[volksman]

It's always nice to start fresh but not always necessary.  I've done a 
number of in place upgrades from 7.10 to 8.04 and have had no issues.  
So that is the easy way and you lose nothing (although always best to 
backup anything you can't live without -just in case-).

You're partition layout is a good one.  Nothing wrong with that.  Swap 
is suggested to be 1.5 times the amount of physical mem but that is 
outdated and not even needed anymore.  I know people who run without 
swap.  Plus (not SURE if this is true or not) I've read that the kernel 
can't handle anything larger than 2 gig swap partitions (nor would you 
want to swap more than that, the machine would be chuggin pretty hard).

If I were you however I would use the update manager to pull 8.04 
updates to your machine and upgrade in place.  That will save you a lot 
of time you can then devote to getting Joomla setup (cause that will be 
a whole new set of headaches when you finally get it installed)... :)



geo wrote:
>
> I'm currently running Ubuntu 7.10 and I received 8.04 on CD in the 
> mail recently. I'l like to upgrade but that usually means wiping the 
> whole drive (EEK!!).
>
>  
>
> I have 50 gig of family stuff that would be lost forever (unless I can 
> borrow my sister-in-law's USB drive???). The drive is 100 gig.
>
>  
>
> Currently the drive is set up as 1 big partition with a small slice 
> set aside as a swap.
>
>  
>
> Would it make sense to set up 2 unequal partitions as well as a swap 
> for a total of 3 partitions?
>
>  
>
> 1 partition would contain only the operating system (maybe 10 gig?)
>
> 1 partition (the larger one) would contain the user home directories 
> (maybe 85 gig?)
>
> 1 partition would be the swap partition (2 gig because my machine has 
> 2 gig of RAM).
>
>  
>
> Does this make sense? Would it work? Is it do-able? Let me know 
> please, I have a 4 day weekend coming up and perhaps I'll have time to 
> do some major housekeeping on the Dell.
>
>  
>
> Thanks
>
> geo
>
>