Moving from 10.04 to 12.04

[Jim Byrnes]

On 09/09/2012 08:13 AM, Liam Proven wrote:
> On 8 September 2012 20:05, Jim Byrnes <jf_byrnes at comcast.net> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> The upgrade will probably work fine, but f you can spare the time &
> effort to do a clean install, the result will be smaller, faster &
> probably more stable.
>
> Running 2 side-by-side is fine and safe and if you wish you can use a
> single swap partition shared between multiple installations - this is
> perfectly fine.
>
>> Thinking about doing the clean install I came up with this idea.  I have a
>> brand new spare HD.  I could put it in my case, unhook the old one and
>> hookup the new one.  Install 12.04, get it running and install what I need.
>> Then hookup the old HD and copy home and what ever else I find I need to my
>> laptop.  Hookup the new HD and copy over what I need from my laptop.  This
>> way I have an untouched copy of 10.04 to use until I get 12.04 setup and
>> running the way I want it.  Does that make sense?
>
> Yes, that's fine. Unlike Windows, which can get confused and use
> resources from an old installation in a new one, *buntu is smart
> enough not to muddle them up. You don't need to disconnect your old
> HD.

Wouldn't there be confusion if there were two bootable HDs in the 
system? Or would GRUB be modified on the fly to handle them?

>> 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.
>
> Out of curiosity, what's the rest of the space for? Windows?

No, its just space I don't need so I didn't format it.  Also wouldn't 
Ubuntu's periodic checking of the disk and maybe any repairs go faster 
with less tracks formatted?

> Anyway, in terms of partitioning.
>
> You only really need 3:
> / - also known as "the root filesystem"
> /home - AKA "the home filesystem"
> swap - which doesn't get mounted, as such, so does not have a path
>
> All the software goes in the root FS. All your data goes in /home.
>
> These days, data is typically much bigger than S/W. Photos take many
> hundreds of meg, ditto music; videos take gigs.
>
> You don't usually need a lot of room for S/W.
>
> I would say that 8GB is a stingy amount of space but would probably
> work fine. 16GB is generous. 32GB is madly generous. More, for most
> people, would be wasteful.
>
> Swap, as you say, is typically 2× RAM (this is an old & now
> over-generous rule of thumb & is almost profligate these days, but
> hey, with a thousand gig to play with, why not?)
>
> All the rest can go to home.
>
> I always do it in a very old-fashion, standard way, using binary round
> numbers (i.e. powers of 2), like this:
>
> [ small optional DOS-bootable primary for BIOS flashing etc. - say
> 32MB, yes, *mega*bytes]
> [ bootable primary root - say 32GB]
> [ extended partition for whole rest of disk; in there: [/home] [swap] ]
>
>> 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
>>
>> $ sudo du -shc /   =>  total 105G
>>
>> $ du -shc /home    =>  total 64G
>
> Just use GParted. Much easier.

Doesn't GParted just show partitions?  Right now I don't have a separate 
/home which is why I am trying to figure out how space I would need in / 
on my system right now if I had a separate /home partition.

> I suggest you give descriptive labels to your existing partitions.
> Gparted will do this & it is safe & non-destructive. Mine are called
> things like:
> "MS-DOS 32MB"
> "Spare primary"
> "Spare Ubuntu root"
> "Win2K 16GB"
> "Win7 24GB"
> "Home"
> "DATA 52GB"
> "2GB SWAP"
>
>> 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?
>
> 41GB is a lot but not madly so on a 1TB drive. It's only 4% of the space.

Reading back over what I wrote maybe I wasn't clear. Right now I only 
have one big partition (disregarding swap).  I am trying to determine 
how big of / partition I need just to accommodate the  S/W I have now. 
To do this I took the size of / and subtracted the size of home. This 
gave me a size of 41GB which seemed large so I am wondering if the 
method I used is valid.

>> If it was valid I am thinking of a / of ~100GB and /home of ~200GB, does
>> that seem OK?
>
> 100 gig is /way/ over the top. I see no reason for more than 32GB max.
>
>

But my calculation tells me it is already 41GB which is why I am 
wondering if my calculation is correct.

Regards, Jim