Preserve programs & settings during reinstall

[ternarybit]

Howdy all,

Say I want to totally reinstall Ubuntu 9.04, but I want to preserve my environment (programs & settings). I have /home on its own partition. I notice that running

type <program name>
reveals that all my programs installed from apt reside in /usr/bin or /usr/sbin.

If I were to back up /usr, /opt and /etc, then reinstall Ubuntu from scratch, remount my /home partition and copy back those dirs, could I preserve my environment just the way it is?

P.S. I want to know because I'm considering migration to an md RAID1 mirror. AFAIK there is no way to do it without reinstalling from scratch.

Thank you!

[TwoWordz]

If you want to move to Raid 1, you don't need to reinstall, you can just add your drive and setup the Raid.

There is good documentation on Linux raid setups here (http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/linux-raid/raid_setup) and documentation on how to make a Raid array from an existing drive here (http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Convert_a_single_drive_system_to_RAID).

As for programs, if you were to reinstall, I would do:


dpkg --get-selections >~myprograms.txt #export program list

after you reinstall:


dpkg --set-selections <~myprograms.txt
apt-get -u dselect-upgrade

This will reinstall the list of your programs.

TW