Start again fresh

[Cilionelle]

Hi there,

I'm back. After a year plus time away, a friend returned an Ubuntu computer to me. I'll be aiming to use it in church to put the song words up on a large screen via data projector, and perhaps use it as a supplementary computer in the house for my kids. It's old, etc, but it works really well and I have fond memories of flailing my way through those early years of Ubuntu use... ah, the memories! (Or should I say, "AGH!!!1!!one! the memories!")

Anyhoo, because my friend was using the beast as his primary laptop for ages and ages, it's got a lot of junk on it that I have no need of. Is there a way to completely wipe the slate clean and start again, from within the OS? It's currently running 11.04, and doing so fine. I don't have any discs for it, neither do I have a large quota for downloading (I'm hijacking my friend's connection to type this...).

Thanks in advance for your help!

Cheers,
Cilionelle

[raja.genupula]

Hi

Actually i am not getting issue properly but what i understand is you wanna install a fresh Ubuntu.

But you wanna keep the old one and wanna run both ? or run a fresh one ?

[Cilionelle]

Thanks for the response, and sorry for the confusion.

Actually i am not getting issue properly but what i understand is you wanna install a fresh Ubuntu.

But you wanna keep the old one and wanna run both ? or run a fresh one ?

Nope. Kill the old one, restart afresh. But without downloading, sourcing, creating, building from the ground up or otherwise having an install disc.

I have only the computer that is in front of me. Is there a way I can reinstall Ubuntu from within Ubuntu or the BIOS, etc? Or from command line?

[raja.genupula]

If you have any Ubuntu ISO and a USB then your job will easier. do you ?

[Cilionelle]

If you have any Ubuntu ISO and a USB then your job will easier. do you ?

Nope. Nada!

[raja.genupula]

then we have only one solution man .

open your software center and look the installed application . so keep what you wish to have and remove all other from there .

then run this

sudo apt-get autoclean
sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get update


this is what i know , all the best man.

[ajgreeny]

You can do quite a lot to tidy up what you have got already, but you will need to be careful not to remove applications that you still want.

Firstly, decide which applications you must have; a word processor, no doubt, but will abiword be good enough or do you want/need LibreOffice instead. The same for a spreadsheet, gnumeric or LibreOffice.

Totem (movie-player) is the default for music and video, I think, but there are many other apps which you could use, and which may already be installed, but it is difficult to know in what way you need to use the machine.

So, in simple terms, you need to decide what you are going to do with the machine, and then remove any applications you see that are on it but you don't use or need, preferably using synaptic, which I think is much better and more flexible that the software-center. Make sure those removals do not also remove any applications/utilities that you know you will need in the lists that will pop up when you hit the remove option on some applications.

If anything important does inadvertently disappear, you can get everything in the default ubuntu back again with the command line using

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

There is no magic answer that I know of to remove junk, as you put it, but remember that linux is not like windows, where lots of unwanted applications can slow down a system. Generally in linux, unneeded applications do nothing more than waste space on the hard disk.

The commands shown by raja.genupula

sudo apt-get autoclean
sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo apt-get update

are certainly worth running after all the above as they will clean up the cache of downloaded packages, remove any unnecessary dependencies, and then make sure everything is up-to-date.

[ottosykora]

just to explain to you:

if you for example mean command line interface, well this is just not the operating system, so from there I could install operating system....
no, this is not true, this is the full operating system running.

Any linux operating system has to be delivered somehow, either on some physical media like CD or flash stick or it has to be downloaded from the internet.
But for the download from internet, some running operating system with all the essential parts like drivers for the network adapter, for the rest of the hardware, and some programs to organize all downloads have to be present.

So either people use the same operating system to make it a newer version by connecting to internet, run the update and this will take some time and will fetch many parts, but far not all, from the repository server and replace it. This works mostly.

Other way to start from zero is to get the operating system on external media, but this can be ordered by normal mail also. Just go to the main site of ubuntu, and look there.

From there on you can install system completely fresh.
But also here , working internet connection during the install is nice, as then all special drivers and extra components can be installed the right way from beginning.

So if you want bypass long downloads, obtain the installation CD from ubuntu:

http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/cds

[Cilionelle]

Thanks, guys! I really appreciate the help.

Follow-up question, then: His user-name and password (let's call it 'steve') are still front and centre. I've added a second admin account and password ('reginald', but my gut tells me that probably there are some config files saved to his profile, or something that I'll miss. Is there a way to get it to default to reginald@Laptop, rather than steve@Laptop?

[ottosykora]

Thanks, guys! I really appreciate the help.

Follow-up question, then: His user-name and password (let's call it 'steve') are still front and centre. I've added a second admin account and password ('reginald', but my gut tells me that probably there are some config files saved to his profile, or something that I'll miss. Is there a way to get it to default to reginald@Laptop, rather than steve@Laptop?

well such things will be stored in the /home/steve and would have permissions set to steve
you would need to move them to /home/reginald and set the permissions to reginald

do you have any specific configs or data in mind?

Mostly such operation is not needed.