[NBLUG/talk] Ubuntu upgrade worked

Troy Arnold troy at zenux.net
Sun Jun 7 15:57:30 PDT 2009


On Sun, Jun 07, 2009 at 11:34:45AM -0700, Emanuel R wrote:
> 
> Thank you everyone for your helpful suggestions.
> Andrew, it worked really well!
> I was able to download and install all updates using the old-release
> repositories.

Yeah, that was a great tip, Andrew!

> One more question though:
> I've always been a little reluctant to upgrade because I had spent so
> much time tweaking and tunning my settings and drivers to make things
> work on my ThinkPad T60p.  Are most settings kept intact in the course
> of upgrade(s)?

...mostly.  In the case of system-wide config files Debian / Ubuntu will
always ask if you'd like to install the new config file version, or keep
your old existing one.  Depending on your choice, the package manager will
usually stash the new version (foo.dpkg-new) or a copy of your old one
(foo.dpkg-old).

But that's for system stuff.  In the case of the files in your home directory
new versions of applications will almost always be able to make sense of
the config file from older an version and "do the right thing".  An
exception to this is in how the transition from kde3 to kde4 worked.
When KDE 3 was the default, its config lived in ~/.kde while KDE 4 used
~/.kde4 . Now, by default, KDE 4 looks in ~/.kde . This can all be very
confusing, especially with things like amaroK where you'll be wondering,
"where the hell did my collection and ratings go?"

Even without this confusion, I've found KDE in general to not be very good
about dealing with its configuration from release to release.  

> Kyle had mentioned to back up "system/data". In addition to the "Home"
> folder, what else should one backup?

I think Kyle was speaking generally about "System Data" not about a
specific folder.  I like to keep a copy of /etc around which is where most
system config files live.  You'll also want to keep anything important from
/var/ .  The definition of "important" will vary from installation to
installation.  There is often data you'd like to keep in /var/lib and
possibly /var/www.  Most people can throw away /var/log and not miss
anything.  But you already have your important data backed up elsewhere,
right? ;-)

Anyway, generally speaking, Ubuntu and Debian upgrades work amazingly well.

-t





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