Moving from 10.04 to 12.04

[Jim Byrnes]

On 09/09/2012 05:28 PM, Avi Greenbury wrote:
> 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.

It has become unorganized.  I go looking for stuff and its not where I 
think it should be.  Normally I keep things well organized but this has 
gotten away from me.  I'm sure I could go through and get it organized 
but I am starting to look at a clean install as a way to start fresh and 
do a better job this time.

>> 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.

I didn't see that, thanks.  As it turns out there was not much in them 
anyway.

> 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).
>

Thanks,  Jim