newbie's questions on the purpose of separate /home, upgrade the distro, etc.

[Cooky Fly]

Hi,

I've reinstalled Ubuntu for several times on my computer with a
separate "/home" partition every time. I'm a new Ubuntu user, but it
works pretty well for me since I don't have to config those usual
softwares again. It would be a good idea any way, because at least
those config files under e.g. .fcitx are still there under
"/home/username/". If some softwares have new version and the config
files are no longer valid, you may as well reconfigure them, which is
still better than reinstall and reconfigure them all, I guess.
I also store the common softwares such as Eclipse, Tomcat in
/home/myusername/Programs or a separate /opt or /usr/lib/Progroms
partition, since I also use them with fixed versions and every time I
reinstall Ubuntu I don't have to download them again. However, there
are softwares that I do have to reinstall such as JDK1.6. Maybe in
this case you can install it in a separate unformatted partition and
do the necessary configuration after install Ubuntu, such as make some
links under /usr/bin... However, I haven't done that before for
myself.


--
All things come through desire and every sincere prayer is answered.

Cooky Fly



On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 7:22 PM, Zhengguo Xu <tworiversfolk at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> The only application (that I use) that requires me to redo the conf file
>> is samba because smb.conf exists in /etc/samba
>>
>> The rest just work.
>>
>> Phil
>
> thanks! that's good to know. i'll try to use my /home when the next version
> of ubuntu is out.
>>
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