Moving from 10.04 to 12.04

[Avi Greenbury]

Jim Byrnes wrote:

> 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.

This, I feel, is largely because people who have no problems tend to
not mention it. I've just had my first ever non-straightforward in-place
upgrade, and all that went wrong was that for an hour and a half I had
no window decorations. That was to a Beta release, too.

Generally, in-place upgrades seem to go just fine.

> 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.

What makes you feel it's a "jumbled mess"? A fresh install will also
remove all your installed packages - a fresh start on a home directory
would be more easily made with a new user account.

> 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?

I've another idea. Plug that disk in and use it as a backup, then
do the upgrade. 

If the upgrade goes wrong you have a backup to use. If it goes well,
you have a backup to use if something else goes wrong.

> $ sudo du -shc /   =>  total 105G
> 
> $ du -shc /home    =>  total 64G

That looks large, but not way out. I've run systems with non-/home as
40G before without them filling up, but the size of it depends on how
much software you install, essentially. In the end, though, it's
entirely dependent on your usage.

Also, du has a '-x' switch which causes it to not traverse filesystems;
you might have included things under /media or /mnt in that du above.

> If it was valid I am thinking of a / of ~100GB and /home of ~200GB,
> does that seem OK?

That certainly seems workable. It's not especially difficult to change
afterwards (though with large partitions it can be time consuming).

-- 
Avi