3 questions about new installations & updates

[Colin Law]

On 23 November 2011 19:26, Udvarias Ur <udvarias1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have been wondering.
>
> 1. I've read on this list that clean installs of Ubuntu 11.10 work better
> the upgrades from 11.04.

Sometimes upgrades can be a problem.  Of course the worst case is that
you need to start again with a clean install so all you have lost in
this case is some time.

>
> If I do such a 'clean' installation of 11.10 will it preserve all the
> software added and the configuration I done? or will it reformat the hard
> disk thereby erasing all that I've done?

To some extent that is up to you.  If you tell it to reformat then it
will do that and you will lose everything done before.  If you have a
separate home partition then you can keep that so no user data will be
lost.  I suspect you have not got a separate partition in which case
if you go down the "something else" route when it asks about how you
want to install, and you tell it to install over the previous version
and do *not* tell it to format that partition then it will again leave
the home folder as it is, so you will not lose user data.

In either case, when you re-install rather than upgrade, you will
still need to re-install any apps that are not installed by default.

>
> 2. Though so far a I have few complaints about Ubuntu, should I decide to
> switch to Debian can I install Debian over Ubuntu such that Debian does not
> reformat the hard disk thereby erasing all that I've done?

Pass on this one.

>
> 3. Can I rearrange the partitions on my hard disk so that I can install
> another OS? i.e. create a triple boot system? If so, how?

Yes, boot off the live CD and run the partition manager (gparted) to
shrink a partition and create a new one, then install into that
partition.

Of course before doing any of this make sure that your backups are
fully up to date and double check that you can actually recover data
off it if you need to.  Even if you are going a route that will
supposedly keep your data things can go wrong at any time.  Tripping
over the power lead in the middle of moving partitions about is a good
one to try.

Colin