Moving from 10.04 to 12.04

[James Freer]

> Sooner or later I will need to move to 12.04.  Before I make the move I need 
> to decide a couple of things.
>
> First should I upgrade or do a clean install.  When I went from Karmac to 
> Lucid I did an upgrade.  It seemed to work well and I have had no problems, 
> but I see a lot of people advocating a clean install.  Looking at my home 
> directory I see it has become a jumbled mess so doing a clean install would 
> give me a chance to restore some order.

I have noticed a number of folk seem to have had problems somehow doing 
upgrades. I have always done a clean install from CD and not had any. Now having 
got a new PC i will probably do a USB install.

> This time I want to try a separate /home partition. I'm trying to decide how 
> much space to give / and how much to /home.  The new HD is a 1TB one, I will 
> probably only format about 300GB. My current HD is 500GB and I formatted 
> about 290GB and have 146GB free.
>
> I googled trying trying to find some guidance on how to allocate the 
> available space between / and /home, but found widely varying suggestions. 
> I decided to look at what I was using on my setup now
>
> So this tells me that if I had a separate / and /home, / would be 41G. 41GB 
> seems large compared to sizes I saw when I doing my search and many of those 
> authors said they installed "tons of stuff".  So is the method I used to 
> calculate my current / size valid?
>
> If it was valid I am thinking of a / of ~100GB and /home of ~200GB, does that 
> seem OK?

I actually did this exercise for the first time a couple of weeks ago. First 
time i was a little unsure like yourself. I have a 500G disk with 4G RAM. For 
swap you need twice your RAM but over 2G stick with the amount of RAM... is what 
i read. But the install disk actually does it for you and answers that question.

So how much space to allocate? I used to have two hard disks so put the system 
on one and used the second for storage - ideal way to my mind. I'm actually a 
xubuntu user - which uses <6G. I chose 100G for / and the rest for /home. Just 
seemed a safe place to start. Now i think 50G would have been a better choice as 
i've got 87G unused. I'm not going to put that much on to use up that amount of 
space.

In summary on the install ubuntu have got everything thought out [excellent OS!] 
you only have to chose the size for / and it will do the rest unless you want to 
allow for a FAT32 partition or another distribution. Personally i think the two 
drives is the safer route... but my smaller drives are pata not sata [think i'd 
have to look into a conversion cable maybe when i get the time].

HTH

james