Reinstalling/Downgrading Ubuntu

[Bret Busby]

On Tue, 19 May 2009, NoOp wrote:

> 
> Having a Karl moment (no offense intended Karl :-) and decided to test
> how best to backdown to hardy from jaunty on one of my test systems
> while preserving the /home folders. I failed as I tried to accomplish
> this from the hardy alternate CD & just ended up reinstalling over the
> drive.
>
> The question of reinstalling/downgrading seems to come up every few
> months, so I'm offering to play guinea pig on a test system for
> suggested methods. So if you have a favorite/workable solution I'd like
> to hear about it. In the end, I'd like to test & document a
> reinstall/downgrade Ubuntu while preserving /home for Dummies set of
> instructions. Note: yes I know that I can do this with a separate /home
> partition, but in the end many/most users don't do this upon
> installation (nor are there easy prompts in the installers to do the
> same), so I'd like to keep to the 'preserve /home' theme.
>
> There are several blueprints & ideas on how to accomplish this:
> https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/ubiquity-preserve-home
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbiquityPreserveHome
> http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/14021/
> [Alternate CD: reinstall Ubuntu over existing partition while preserving
> /home ]
> http://ubuntutip.googlepages.com/reinstall
> [How to reinstall Ubuntu]
> http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/5390/
> [Offer to create a separate /home partition and use existing ones]
>
> I don't mind testing the above and any other solutions folks have to
> offer (it's a slow week in client land). I'd very much like to figure
> out how to easily do this with the Alternate CD(s).
>
> Note: Only standard Gnome Ubuntu liveCD & Alternate CD suggestions please.
>
> Along these same lines, sometime back there was a thread "apt-get system
> reinstallation" whereby Andy Baxter wrote up a nice howto
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReinstallingSamePackages
> Note to Andy: I ran across this in my search on how to reinstall
> existing packages & this uses Synaptic and seems to be a very easy way
> to accomplish the same task:
> <http://www.ubuntugeek.com/howto-reinstall-all-of-currently-installed-packages-in-fresh-ubuntu-install.html>
>
>
>

It is probably not what you want, but, from memory, what I did (in 
upgrading from 8.10 to 8.04) was to make a partition on an external 
storage device, copy the /home directory (as much as was allowed, due to 
privilege) to the external partition, install 8.04 as a new installation 
on the 8.10 partition, then copy the contents of the copied home 
directory, back to the newly installed 8.04 /home directory, which seems 
to have worked.

--
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..............

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
  you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
   Chapter 28 of Book 1 of
   "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
   A Trilogy In Four Parts",
   written by Douglas Adams,
   published by Pan Books, 1992

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