3 questions about new installations & updates

[Ralph Puncher]

On 11-11-23 04:03 PM, Colin Law wrote:
> 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.
See: 
http://www.ubuntugeek.com/howto-reinstall-all-of-currently-installed-packages-in-fresh-ubuntu-install.html

to re-install all previously installed software.
>> 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
>

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