Upgrading question

[Konstantinos Togias]

On 5/14/06, C Hamel <yogich at sc2000.net> wrote:
> 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
>
>
> --
> ubuntu-users mailing list
> ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
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>
>
>
>

My consern is not whether the upgrade will succeed or not. It is
whether the resulting system will be less fast or stable than a
clean-installed one.

-- 
Konstantinos Togias
University Of Patras
Dept. of Mathematics