Upgrading question

[C Hamel]

On Sunday 14 May 2006 05:14, Konstantinos Togias wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have a production desktop PC that runs Ububntu Breezy 5.10 . My last
> clean installation was more than a year ago with Ubuntu Hoary. I Then
> upadated to Breezy by changing the sources.list and perforning
> dist-upgrade.
>
> Using the pc in a daily basis I have made a lot of customizations and
> installations of programs, services etc. I have installed Automatix, I
> have a Firefox 1.5 installation at /opt/, I also have compiled and
> installed from source some programs and daemons (lirc, mplayer,
> gparted).
>
> As Dapper will be released in June, I will upgrade to it sooner or
> later. So I am wondering:
>
> What is preferable: To just dist-upgrade from my breezy, or to do a
> clean install??
>
> On one hand I want to keep my configuration. It will be a furstration
> to have to install and configure all those programs that are not in
> the standard installation (I use apache,php,mysql,lirc,have configured
> my tvtuner card, and a lot more that I cannot remember and that I will
> realize that are missing when I find my self typing commands and
> getting "command not found"). In order to avoid all this I incline to
> the dist-upgrade method.
>
> On the other hand, I am wondering if an installation of the new
> packages on top of the old ones will have any bad effect to the
> performance or the stability of the system. Eg. How will gnome 2.14
> run using the configuration created by 2.10 and customized by me? Will
> I have to manually find and delete the binaries at /opt/ and
> /usr/local/ that may not work on the new system? Take into account
> that the pc is quite old (A PIII at 450MHz) and I do not want to have
> remainings and configurations inherited by the old system that just
> slow down or have a negative effect to the stability of the machine.
>
> So my final question is:
> Is there anything that I have to win by doing a fresh install,
> compared to just dist-upgradeing to Dapper? What do you suggest?
>
> Thanks,
>
> --
> Konstantinos Togias
> University Of Patras
> Dept. of Mathematics
Having been in your predicament, myself (customized, Automatix, etc) I can 
only say that Automatix backs up your sources.list & replaces it with its 
own ...never notifying that it did so --not that I detected, anyhow.  Unless 
you investigated the script, know this, and replaced your own sources.list 
b-4 you did anything further, you have, IMHO a pretty good chance that the 
dist-upgrade will succeed.  If you did not realize this, I fear the upgrade 
will be a problem for you ...as it was for me since I did not inspect the 
Automatix script b-4 using it (shame on me...).

Once I did realize this, recovered my backup, changed back to my sources, & 
did the dist-upgrade... I had success.  If you want to be absolutely_certain, 
do a clean installation.

FWIW...
-- 
	...CH
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