6month & reinstall - do u worry?

[towsonu2003]

as a newbie not used to reinstalling everything time and again, everytime i boot into ubuntu, i feel like nothing is gonna stay intact whatever i do because there will be a new version in 6 months and i will end up doing a clean install (bc. dist-upgrade breaks ubuntu). i did not have this problem w/ other distros bc. i never imagined my self using them 2 years from now...

do u have this worry as well???? how do u cope w/ it???

thanks.

[welsh_spud]

My /home directory is on a different partition. So if I have to re-install Ubuntu (or even change distro for a while) its only a matter of ticking a load of boxes in Synaptic to get back to normal.

[DoeRayMe]

Dist upgrade breaks systems, since when? i went from Hoary -> Breezy and now from Breezy -> Dapper*In Development* using dist-upgrade

[towsonu2003]

Dist upgrade breaks systems, since when? i went from Hoary -> Breezy and now from Breezy -> Dapper*In Development* using dist-upgrade

then let me correct:

as a newbie not used to reinstalling everything time and again, everytime i boot into ubuntu, i feel like nothing is gonna stay intact whatever i do because there will be a new version in as a newbie not used to reinstalling everything time and again, everytime i boot into ubuntu, i feel like nothing is gonna stay intact whatever i do because there will be a new version in 6 months and i will end up doing a clean install (bc. dist-upgrade breaks ubuntu). i did not have this problem w/ other distros bc. i never imagined my self using them 2 years from now...

do u have this worry as well???? how do u cope w/ it??? especially remembering and re-downloading your favorite packages?

thanks.

PS. no trolling, this is curiosity.

[aysiu]

Breezy dist-upgrade broke mine, and I had to do a clean reinstall. It doesn't happen for everyone, but it does happen occasionally--let's just say it's not a rare occurrence, even if it's not standard.

My plan, since Breezy was my first dist-upgrade, is to wait until Dapper is stable (maybe a month or two after it comes out), then upgrade to that then, rather than upgrading on release day or even before the official release day (as I did with Breezy).

[MetalMusicAddict]

I sometimes dont like the 6 month release cycle. Going from Hoary to Breezy fixed some hardware issues so I was happy. Unless Dapper is a big change Im unsure if Ill upgrade.

[idn]

I guess the thing i you dont have to upgrade, if you are happy with your system, stick with it.

I keep my my music, photos and ocuments on a seperate hard drive, so I hopefully will never loose them. You could always install the newest distro nest to your current and run them both in parellell unstil you are happy with your new install.


Or just dist-upgrade, it worked for me a bunch of times. Didnt try it this time though.

[aysiu]

Releases get supported (i.e., security updates) for 18 months after release. There's no need to upgrade every six months if it's too much trouble.

[Strangerdave]

as a newbie not used to reinstalling everything time and again, everytime i boot into ubuntu, i feel like nothing is gonna stay intact whatever i do because there will be a new version in 6 months and i will end up doing a clean install (bc. dist-upgrade breaks ubuntu). i did not have this problem w/ other distros bc. i never imagined my self using them 2 years from now...

do u have this worry as well???? how do u cope w/ it???

thanks.

WOW I wonder what distro you use? I think most Linux distros do the same, at least there is a major upgrade within six months, but I think that has to do with the fact that GNOME upgrades itself every six months too (I know SUSE upgrades every 6-9 months).

At any rate, who says you have to upgrade? If you like Hoary, stick with it for as long as you like. Ubuntu changes are based on major changes in GNOME and other essential programs.

I also wonder why you have to reinstall everything and loose what you have. I did a upgrade from Hoary to Breezy with no problems what so ever, and my settings, documents and vital info all stayed the same. Maybe it was too early to do the upgrade and programs weren't complete.

Let's face it, you could use ******* and have to buy a new OS every two years or so and not know if what you are using is safe, wait 6 months and have them come out with a security patch that might fix half the problems.

Too bad you feel this way, cause I think that Ubuntu is great and will continue to stick with it and all the releases as I see fit. If Breezy is the best for me, then I will continue to use Breezy, if not then I know a secure distro is out there that I can upgrade to.

-SD-

[towsonu2003]

Too bad you feel this way, cause I think that Ubuntu is great and will continue to stick with it and all the releases as I see fit.
-SD-

sorry that this got you angry. as i said, i am not trolling... this is curiousity.



WOW I wonder what distro you use? I think most Linux distros do the same
-SD-

as I said, I never used a distro imagining that I was gonna stick with it for a long time (like, 1 year...). This is a first for me, so i wanna know what others do/feel/want/perceive.
As for the distros, I used opensuse (3 weeks), fedora (1 week), centros (2 days), knoppix (a couple of hours), slackware (2 months -very good one-), turkix (1 day), simplyMepis (2 days). So i never had to think about upgrading :)



At any rate, who says you have to upgrade? If you like Hoary, stick with it for as long as you like.


agreed. so would you upgrade hoary after 20 months as you won't have support for it? as aysiu notes:



Releases get supported (i.e., security updates) for 18 months after release. There's no need to upgrade every six months if it's too much trouble.


which clears things for me. as an ex-windows user, my mind is: if something is updated, grab it while you can :)



I keep my my music, photos and ocuments on a seperate hard drive, so I hopefully will never loose them. You could always install the newest distro nest to your current and run them both in parellell unstil you are happy with your new install.


and



My /home directory is on a different partition. So if I have to re-install Ubuntu (or even change distro for a while) its only a matter of ticking a load of boxes in Synaptic to get back to normal.


that's what i do as well :) so it seems i'm not missing anything.

As a footnote, you have to understand the paranoia and the fear you experience when you know you have to format stuff periodically :)

:cool:

thanks for the replies, i appreciate it. other distros usually kick you hard for such newbie questions... (which makes me think...: I should have posted this in "Absolute Beginner" forum - my bad - sorry)

[PatrickMay16]

as a newbie not used to reinstalling everything time and again, everytime i boot into ubuntu, i feel like nothing is gonna stay intact whatever i do because there will be a new version in 6 months and i will end up doing a clean install (bc. dist-upgrade breaks ubuntu). i did not have this problem w/ other distros bc. i never imagined my self using them 2 years from now...

do u have this worry as well???? how do u cope w/ it???

thanks.
That's how I feel, too. I got Hoary installed and working in September, then all of a sudden Breezy was released and people were acting like it's the best thing since sliced bread, while I sat with my outdated Hoary wondering what I'm missing out on, and if it's worth running the risk of breaking everything just to get it all updated.

[Strangerdave]

WEll no need to apoligize for I wasn't mad or angry, just confused. If you haven't used an OS for very long, how can you be upset at having to update every 6 months?

It is good that you are testing the waters so to speak for there are many many flavors of Linux, but you shouldn't feel paranoid and shouldn't have to format all that often.

If I liked hoary, then I would stick with it for as long as it worked for me, whether that is 20 months or 20 years (however since I like to tinker, chances are it wouldn't be long before I upgraded).:razz:

-SD-

EDIT** Upgrading to Breezy is smooth, all the hype about stuff being broken was before the official release. Things are better now. Like I said, I did an upgrade 2 weeks before Breezy came out and have yet to have any problems.

[Sheinar]

Like it's already been said, you don't have to upgrade, so I don't see anything to worry about. I'm using Hoary and doubt that'll change any time soon. I've only installed Breezy once and that was to upgrade to Dapper, hoping for something unstable to play with.

[Xian]

That's how I feel, too. I got Hoary installed and working in September, then all of a sudden Breezy was released and people were acting like it's the best thing since sliced bread, while I sat with my outdated Hoary wondering what I'm missing out on, and if it's worth running the risk of breaking everything just to get it all updated.
I would only upgrade for two reasons:

1. Something is broke that I want to fix.
2. I want to break something to learn a new fix.

:)

The best policy is to wait a few weeks after the FINAL release of the latest version (in this case Breezy), back up anything you can't afford to lose just as a precaution, and then do the upgrade. The vast majority of upgrade problems are caused by either not waiting for the final product, or having some third party software pkgs installed which causes the package manager to fail during the system installation.

[xequence]

I dont worry at all. I reinstall OSes very often... I installed breezy two weeks ago, deleted it, installed fedora core, deleted it, and I am back with breezy.

Even if I managed to keep it for six months, I wouldent have to upgrade. People now still use warty.

[PatrickMay16]

I would only upgrade for two reasons:

1. Something is broke that I want to fix.
2. I want to break something to learn a new fix.

:)

The best policy is to wait a few weeks after the FINAL release of the latest version (in this case Breezy), back up anything you can't afford to lose just as a precaution, and then do the upgrade. The vast majority of upgrade problems are caused by either not waiting for the final product, or having some third party software pkgs installed which causes the package manager to fail during the system installation.
Thanks. I'll wait a few weeks before considering the update.
The thing which worries me the most about updating is having it break things which were difficult to get working but are incredibly important to me, like midi support, and being unable to get those working again no matter what I try. Though I dunno if that's likely or not, I'm still worried about it... I guess anything could happen.

[flibble]

1. Backup your old install.
2. Make sure you backed up your old install like everyone always tells you.
3. Really. Make a backup now.
4. I bet you gnome 2.14 that people aren't making a backup.
5. If you are actually making a backup, you don't have anything to "fear" or "be paranoid about" anymore. Just upgrade and if you're not happy... restore your system.
6. So, go make a backup.
7. REALLY.
8. goto 1

[mark]

Rule #1: Make /home on a separate partition.
Rule #2: Back-up /home early & often!

It helps if you have 2 drives installed - I use /dev/hda as a "working" drive and /dev/hdb as my "hmm...wonder what this looks like??? Let's install it!!!" drive.

I've had mixed results with dist-upgrade between versions - as Chief Dan George once remarked, "Sometimes the magic works. Somtimes it doesn't. That is the way of things." Be assured that, with some practice, reinstalling a distro is not a Really Big Deal. So long as you save your data...

[jnoreiko]

especially remembering and re-downloading your favorite packages?


I tend to keep a list of what I've installed.

The really cool thing would be to write a script that gets a list of what packages you have installed, removes those that are installed by the distro, and then outputs another shell script you can run later on to get them again :)

[UbuWu]

Breezy dist-upgrade broke mine, and I had to do a clean reinstall. It doesn't happen for everyone, but it does happen occasionally--let's just say it's not a rare occurrence, even if it's not standard.


When dist-upgrading breaks your system, file bugs about it, because it shouldn't.

[UbuWu]

which clears things for me. as an ex-windows user, my mind is: if something is updated, grab it while you can :)


Just be sure you install all the security updates though (when the little red icon appears on the panel).

[UbuWu]

Releases get supported (i.e., security updates) for 18 months after release. There's no need to upgrade every six months if it's too much trouble.

The next release (6.04) will be supoorted for even longer: 3 years on the desktop. So if you find upgrading troublesome, just do one more to dapper when it is released, and then you are set for the next three years.

[Zotova]

How about a service pack similar to those from Windows?

For example once Dapper is available it will be supported for a long time - but 6 months later the version after Dapper (Eagle is it?) will be out with a newer version of Gnome, programs etc.

Instead of dist-upgrade how about a service pack with the new features. Something you could download and run and it would then replace the programs which would be outdated. Of course I doubt that could be done for the kernel but it should be possible for Gnome and programs?

Also with that kind of update if any other programs were installed the program would just ignore those programs and nothing would get broken.

(I also had my system broken when dist-upgrading from Hoary > Breezy)

To put it shortly, this could be an update for users who don't mind having an older kernel but would like the latest versions of programs which are in Dapper, or are in the version after Dapper etc.

[Brunellus]

the backports project should address those concerns.

I had a broken system after a hoary > breezy dist-upgrade, but it wasn't anything an apt-get install -f didn't fix. of course, I had to find out how to do that.

Good thing I'm not command-line phobic. Also good that wireless networking was not broken, and I was able to fix the system largely over ssh (while simultaneously using irssi in textmode on another computer to get help from the awesome humans on #ubuntuforums).

I'm not scared of the semiannual update cycle, and the frequent security patching is nice as well. All told, upgrading a debian-daughter OS is pretty painless, compared to RPM-based ones, or, worse, Slackware....

[tonderai]

1. Backup your old install.
2. Make sure you backed up your old install like everyone always tells you.
3. Really. Make a backup now.
4. I bet you gnome 2.14 that people aren't making a backup.
5. If you are actually making a backup, you don't have anything to "fear" or "be paranoid about" anymore. Just upgrade and if you're not happy... restore your system.
6. So, go make a backup.
7. REALLY.
8. goto 1

Agreed.

See this thread (http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=35087) for a really simple system backup.

[towsonu2003]

The next release (6.04) will be supoorted for even longer: 3 years on the desktop.

that's even more good news combined with all other very helpful replies.

I'm thankfull to all.

[imagine]

I made a backup and dist-upgraded from Hoary to Breezy this week. Everything went fine, no problems while upgrading and all my personal settings were kept intact. So I can't complain, in fact it was the smoothest operating system upgrade I ever saw. Just usplash didn't work and WMV couldn't be played from within Firefox anymore. Probably there are some easy fixes for that but I didn't even try to find some, since there was nothing in Breezy which blew me away. It just looked and felt like Hoary, so I thought "why bother upgrading" and restored the backup. (I have to add that I used Hoary-Backports and Hoary-Extras very much, so I have some of the newer software anyway.)
I'll probably stick with Hoary until one or two months after Dapper final is released. I never jump on a software just the day it comes out.

I think many of the problems some people experienced are

a) because of software which was installed without dpkg/apt-get/aptitude and resulted in conflicts which the package management software isn't aware of (I know that Ubuntu-packages don't exist for every application)

b) because they got told that all it takes to upgrade is do a "sed s/hoary/breezy/g" in the sources.list && update && dist-upgrade. Of course the upgrade can go that easy, but it's certainly not wrong to have closer look at the apt-get database and the sources.list before upgrading.

[Jessehk]

My question:

I know to back-up my home directory when doing a dist-upgrade (or a fresh install, which is what I am planning when Dapper is released as a final ), that all the files are saved. But aren't there configuration files for applications in the directory as well? eg: /home/jesse/.mplayer

Would those files interfere with a new installation?

[towsonu2003]

My question:

I know to back-up my home directory when doing a dist-upgrade (or a fresh install, which is what I am planning when Dapper is released as a final ), that all the files are saved. But aren't there configuration files for applications in the directory as well? eg: /home/jesse/.mplayer

Would those files interfere with a new installation?

usually they don't. but some do (like those for gnome, in my last install). for those, i just remove them and restart the application (restart X for gnome) and re-do the configuration -unfortunately-. hopefully someone will say something if that's something not to do :)