oldefoxx
November 9th, 2009, 12:15 AM
On my PC, Ubuntu 9.10 did not work out as an upgrade from version 9.04. I guess it could be even worse if you have an earlier version of Ubuntu. And I am not thrilled with what I see in Ubuntu 9.10 after a clean install. In some ways, it is more like Windows, particularly Vista, than Microsoft imposed on us. You might want to put off the upgrade for a bit until some issues are addressed and fixed. Question that comes to light is, who is the real boss here? You, or some criteria set forth by someone more concerned about corporate security?
You try it, you should probably see what I mean in short order.
Trouble with a clean install is, what happens to the work you have on your existing install? An upgrade should take care of that, if it worked like it is suppose to. But maybe you had better think about doing a backup first, or find some other way to protect that work.
Here is what I decided to do: I wanted to copy just my work to another drive. But where is my work? Under my user account in the /home folder, of course. So can I just copy /home or /username to another drive? That should work, though the applications that you need for that work will not go with this. But the applications should be downloadable and reinstallable, and the work then recovered by copying back what you saved to the same /home structure that you copied it all out of.
I tried to use the GUI to peform the copy process, because you can do a copy and paste between views of what you want to save from and where you want to copy to. Trouble is, root cannot run from the GUI (one of those decisions made in favor of security), so to do it you have to enter the terminal mode and use the sudo su or the sudo -s command to become super user.
Now you have to find whatever internal partition or external drive you want to copy to. For most, these will show up under Places/Computer or Places/Removable Media. Once you verify what it is named, you use the Terminal mode to create a folder on that partition or drive named home or home1, of something like that. then to perform the copy from the present Ubuntu install to the new folder, you would enter a command something like this:
cp -r /home/* /media/drivename/foldername
Of course you replace drivename with the name that appears for that drive in /media, and foldername with whatever you named the new folder to be. It can take awhile for the copy to complete, but that should do it.
Now you do the new Ubuntu 9.10 install either over the existing version or somewhere else on a free partition. When this boots up,
go back to the place where you copied to, and go up in the folder tree until you find the user-named folder. Don't go into that folder,
but again, use that name in the following comman:
cp -r /media/drivename/folders up to useraccount/* /home
If you do this right, then this will show you the user account in /home:
dir /home
username
if instead you see this:
home
or something like this:
Desktop
Then you copied from a level too low or from a level too high and got it wrong. That means cleaning up by using the rm -r * command and trying it again with some slight difference in fhe cp parameters.
Ubuntu 9.10 is suppose to have or get the latest and greatest of everything, so don't plan on ignoring it forever. But on my PCs, I still maintain installs of 9.04 and 8.04 as well. In some ways, they just feel better to me.
You try it, you should probably see what I mean in short order.
Trouble with a clean install is, what happens to the work you have on your existing install? An upgrade should take care of that, if it worked like it is suppose to. But maybe you had better think about doing a backup first, or find some other way to protect that work.
Here is what I decided to do: I wanted to copy just my work to another drive. But where is my work? Under my user account in the /home folder, of course. So can I just copy /home or /username to another drive? That should work, though the applications that you need for that work will not go with this. But the applications should be downloadable and reinstallable, and the work then recovered by copying back what you saved to the same /home structure that you copied it all out of.
I tried to use the GUI to peform the copy process, because you can do a copy and paste between views of what you want to save from and where you want to copy to. Trouble is, root cannot run from the GUI (one of those decisions made in favor of security), so to do it you have to enter the terminal mode and use the sudo su or the sudo -s command to become super user.
Now you have to find whatever internal partition or external drive you want to copy to. For most, these will show up under Places/Computer or Places/Removable Media. Once you verify what it is named, you use the Terminal mode to create a folder on that partition or drive named home or home1, of something like that. then to perform the copy from the present Ubuntu install to the new folder, you would enter a command something like this:
cp -r /home/* /media/drivename/foldername
Of course you replace drivename with the name that appears for that drive in /media, and foldername with whatever you named the new folder to be. It can take awhile for the copy to complete, but that should do it.
Now you do the new Ubuntu 9.10 install either over the existing version or somewhere else on a free partition. When this boots up,
go back to the place where you copied to, and go up in the folder tree until you find the user-named folder. Don't go into that folder,
but again, use that name in the following comman:
cp -r /media/drivename/folders up to useraccount/* /home
If you do this right, then this will show you the user account in /home:
dir /home
username
if instead you see this:
home
or something like this:
Desktop
Then you copied from a level too low or from a level too high and got it wrong. That means cleaning up by using the rm -r * command and trying it again with some slight difference in fhe cp parameters.
Ubuntu 9.10 is suppose to have or get the latest and greatest of everything, so don't plan on ignoring it forever. But on my PCs, I still maintain installs of 9.04 and 8.04 as well. In some ways, they just feel better to me.