Reinstallation / Migration HOWTO?

[Nils Kassube]

Amichai Rotman wrote:
> I want to re-install my Kubuntu box. I am currently running Kubuntu
> Hardy (8.04.2).
>
> I have an 80GB HDD partitioned as follows:
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use%   Mounted on
>
> /dev/sda1              38G   11G   25G  31%    /
> /dev/sda3              38G   34G  2.2G  95%    /home
>
> As you can see, too much disk space gets wasted on the root (/)
> partition.
>
> I'd like to re-partition the drive to make more room for my $HOME, so
> I thought I'd give the root (/) about 20 GB and the rest for my
> $HOME. 

Seems reasonable to me.

> Then, I thought I'd install from a regular Ubuntu (Gnome 
> desktop by default) and then install the 'kubuntu-desktop' package. I
> do not like the Gnome desktop (freedom of choice, and all that, you
> know...). I thought doing it this way because I felt the Kubuntu ISO
> is not quite stable, out of the box....

Can you explain what you mean with "the Kubuntu ISO is not quite stable, 
out of the box"? I haven't seen a problem with it and I have installed 
several machines with the Kubuntu 8.04 and 8.04.1 ISOs. If you don't 
want to have Gnome anyway, it would be a lot of work to uninstall the 
GNOME packages after the installation. Another option would be a text 
based installation with the Ubuntu mini image [1]. Then you can select 
the packages you want to use without the intermediate step of 
installing an unwanted desktop.

> Also, I'd like to hear from any of you that may have tried to re-size
> a partition on a live system... I wouldn't do it, but maybe someone
> tried it as part of a test on a test machine.

I have used gparted from a LiveCD system several times to resize ext3 
partitions. I never had a problem with it but I would suggest you make 
backups of your valuable data first. That's what you would have to do 
anyway if you want to start from scratch. The advantage is that you 
will keep your installed system like it is now but you have more free 
space on /home. The disadvantage is that it takes quite some time for 
gparted to resize partitions.


Nils

[1] <https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/MinimalCD>