If you had to reinstall Ubuntu..

[damis648]

If you HAD to reinstall Ubuntu, no way you can fix the problem, whatever it may be, how long do you think it would take you to reconfigure your hardware and set up the system the way you want it? This excludes the installation process. For me, I would say less than an hour. All I have to change are a few themes, i would take my compiz exported configuration and import it, and install some extra software from some extra repos. How about you?

[Tom--d]

It would take me 1 hour to get everything back to normal :)

[damis648]

It would take me 1 hour to get everything back to normal :)

Same... just added a poll.

[Anthony M]

Less then an hour. That's the beauty of a seperate /home partition :popcorn:

[damis648]

Less then an hour. That's the beauty of a seperate /home partition :popcorn:

True, but i have an external HDD that I can just copy my home over to and reinstall. (I do try not to copy hidden files and folders, as these configurations i have found can mess some things up).

[fatality_uk]

If at work, phew all day. I mean it's a really tough install. That's why its so hard to break.

If at home about 1-2 hours :D

[lisati]

For me, the basic install would be a breeze. Assuming I haven't gone over the monthly gigabyte limit for my internet connection, an hour or so sounds right. Pulling in all the current updates for Feisty, however, is an overnight job (and possibly then some) at dial-up speeds. (The ISP I use throttles ADSL connections down to "dial-up" speed when I exceed the monthly gigabyte limit. It's still slightly faster than what I used to get on regular dial-up: about 7-8KB/s on "choked" compared to 5.3KB/s on dial-up)

[lisati]

http://www.rewards1.com/common/images/banners/general1.gif (http://www.rewards1.com/index.php?referrer_id=170656)
And the relevance is......? People who work from home have more time?:lolflag:

[samjh]

Less than an hour, not including downloading time for updates.

It's why I use Ubuntu. The get-up-and-go time is very short. Otherwise I'd use Debian. ;)

[nick09]

It would take a hour or less to grab all updates and such.

[bufsabre666]

1-2 hours, i have alot of files to download and install but thats still almost nothing in comparison to windows

[damis648]

1-2 hours, i have alot of files to download and install but thats still almost nothing in comparison to windows

Yes... if I had to reinstall Windows i wouldn't even bother! I can live without Adobe software!

[mthei]

Removing unwanted applications takes the most time for me, but recently I've learned that a graphical utility makes this task easier, as you can see what's installed and not forget about anything. This ends up taking about twenty minutes, as it's slower than using the CLI, plus Compiz and OpenOffice take a long time to remove. But removing everything first makes the updates go faster, especially if you do a clean install of Hardy now, when it's well over a month old and there are well over 170 or so updates.
Installing applications that I do need takes very little time, as it's all from the repos, and the command line makes it faster than with Synaptic.
So in total, Ubuntu takes me about 30-40 minutes, post-installation, to set up.

This past weekend, I had installed Ubuntu again, so that's accurate.
Two days later I went back to Fedora, as it runs better with my particular hardware, but the setup time is pretty much the same, but having less to remove makes up for the fact that there are more upgrades to sit through.

[FranMichaels]

About 15 minutes. Nice that the repository added much more software that I use. Download time is a factor, but I'm not including it in the 15min, lest it would be much more (or about the same if I was using a kick butt net connection.)

Basically I head into synaptic, check off, awn, scummvm, dosbox, swfdec, mednafen, *gstreamer10, audacious*, vlc, ffmpeg, mplayer, hmm And then repeat when I remember some other application I use :lolflag: That would be kind of an update as I go though, so not really much pre-planning :)

My main tweaks to Ubuntu are as follows, disable software mixing, remove tracker from sessions... and um... Change the wallpaper and get rid of the bottom gnome-panel... Drag the shortcuts from the gnome menu into awn... Should be good for most things at this point...

[damis648]

My main tweaks to Ubuntu are as follows, disable software mixing, remove tracker from sessions... and um... Change the wallpaper and get rid of the bottom gnome-panel... Drag the shortcuts from the gnome menu into awn... Should be good for most things at this point...

Pretty much same for me except I keep software mixing and I change the theme. :popcorn: (As well as importing settings into compiz)

[mc4100]

I voted for the whole day .... 'cause if I had both corrupted my machine and backups, I would need to reinstall and:
- Fix showstoppers: no sound, graphics, mouse, networking, etc.,
- Remove unneeded packages.
- Add non-default apps (gnome-mplayer, fyre, gtkpod, pan, gftp, etc.,)
- Install ccsm and configure <-- this takes ages.
- Stop unneeded services: printing, indexing, etc., and disable other features such as ipv6.
- Update (And go make coffee)
- Customize Grub, usplash, login window and splash-screen
- Grab themes from gnome-look, then swap icons from different themes; configure fonts, wallpaper and mouse)
- Get multimedia codecs, enable DVD playback (Or get vlc) and install Handbrake
- Configure gnome-panel, install Conky and svn Awn, then customize
- Get newer versions of apps (Gimp, etc.,) from getdeb.org
- Remove mono apps like F-Spot and Tomboy && purge mono
- Go through individual application configurations (Pidgin, Rhythmbox, Totem, SoundJuicer, OpenOffice.org Writer, etc,.)
- Configure Main Menu with alacarte
- Add third-party repos for thing like iPod-Convenience and Banshee (should you desire it)
- Set-up Evolution with mail accounts and calendars.
- Customize Firefox performance with about:config ... Get Firefox extensions (NoScript, Adblock Plus, CustomizeGoogle, etc.,)

There will be some minutiae I've missed, but that's about it.
Oh!, of course ...
Painstakingly Bittorent hundreds-of-thousands of lost songs (Just kidding)

[Lostincyberspace]

1 hour total including downloading software updates and install (give or take five minutes).

[zachtib]

I've gotten pretty good at reinstalling. Migrate over a backup of my sources.list and run a few installs is really all there is to it. I used Foxmarks to sync my bookmarks, so all those'd be easy to recover, and most of my random data is backed up somewhere on the network, so I could grab it easily.

EDIT:

- Remove mono apps like F-Spot and Tomboy && purge mono
...
- Add third-party repos for thing like iPod-Convenience and Banshee (should you desire it)

Purge mono, then go get Banshee?

[ciclo]

it's not hard, as long as you make your /home locate on a separate partition
ant backup your software database

[hellion0]

Kind of funny, I just had to do it today. Took three hours. It involved fixing the configs for my machine's video card (which isn't fully handled "out of the box"), migrating configs for irssi, conky and my Samba shares, tweaking the themes to the way I like them, installing kubuntu-desktop, ubuntustudio-audio, ubuntustudio-graphics, irssi and the newest kernel on a Xubuntu base and finally tweaking Wine. Took about 4 hours.

[Fedz]

I always write the latest Ubuntu version to disk upon release and or major change, this comes from my Windows days of lending my disk out to others and my system failing requiring a re-install and not having the disk :rolleyes:

Takes 1-2 hrs with install and getting the theme and disable a few bits like evolution, indexing ...etc.

Once you've done it a few times you manage to get the tweaking down to a fine art ;-)

[macogw]

I'd keep my /home directory with all its dot-files, my hardware has out-of-the-box support...all I'd need to do is reinstall my software. And heck, dpkg --get-selections

[angry_johnnie]

It depends, really... I don't like having a separate /home partition, and have been without one for quite some time. But then, I do break it sometimes. If it's a clean installation, it would take about four hours to get updates, add/remove software, and customize it to my liking.

It's fun, sometimes. But sometimes I just don't have the time to do it. And, that's when remastersys comes handy. I usually keep a remastersys'd copy of my working installation, so that if anything goes wrong, It will only take the time needed to install it, and it will all be just the way it should. :-)

[Famicommander]

Less than an hour. I've installed Ubuntu about ten times now.

[dizee]

I have had to reinstall Ubuntu Hardy actually when I tried to update the kernel and grub broke (probably gfxboot's fault), and I couldn't fix it from the live cd. It took a while to get set up again but all I needed to do was to install the programs and the bulk of my time was spent trying to get my graphics drivers installed.

Even though my /home partition was on / when I reinstalled I chose not to format that partition and was pleasantly surprised to see that the /home folder was fully intact and untouched when the install was complete - nice.

[beercz]

I suppose it takes me an hour or two to install and configure my ubuntu system. It then takes over a day to restore all the data from my backup!!

I voted for the last option.

btw I reinstall and set up several Windows machines @ work and it can take up to 3 days - most of that time taken up with installing Windows updates.

[Masoris]

Less then an hour. That's the beauty of a seperate /home partition :popcorn:

Yes that is!
So I can reinstall this way:

Input Ubuntu CD, format / partion and reinstall Ubuntu.
Install and update packages.
Reboot and done.

It takes less then an hour, depends on internet connection speed. Above all it's really easy :KS

[IamReck]

Less then a hour. I back up my /home partition. I have an Ubuntu CD so it may take a while to download all those updates.

But then again, I get 25 MB/s down...

[billgoldberg]

Downloading and installing updates : 15- 25 min.

Installing applications : 10 min (download and installing)

Setting preferred applications for all apps: 10 min

Restoring back ups: 30 minutes

Customizing themes, icons, ... = 30 min (yes on every fresh install, I need new themes I haven't tried before)

= 1h45min

I enjoy this process.

[billgoldberg]

Less then a hour. I back up my /home partition. I have an Ubuntu CD so it may take a while to download all those updates.

But then again, I get 25 MB/s down...

You mean 25mbit, 25MB would be too crazy, no server would give you this and your hard drive could be having trouble keeping up.

[Greyed]

Less then an hour. That's the beauty of a seperate /home partition :popcorn:

That's not exclusive to a separate /home partition any more, at least with KUbuntu's installer. When I had to install 8.04 on a machine where everything is on a single partition it recognized that /home was on the same partition as /, /var, /usr, and so on. It then offered to delete /usr, /var and a few others in lieu of formatting the partition. Saves /home across installs but cleans the slate. Double-plus-kudos for the KUbuntu team for that one.

[scouser73]

It takes me roughly an hour to have everything the way it was.

[nnamdi]

hello all u are sayin 1hour max hwo d u want to go abt it, installing yoour libs,dependencies etc did u think about that tooo

[Linuxratty]

It would take a hour or less to grab all updates and such.

yep..I even have my favorite desktops Foxmarked...So it's a snap.

[tbrminsanity]

I make a lot of changes that would normally take me hours (if not days) to get everything right, but luck for me I've taken the appropriate steps to speed up the process and I can have everything configured to my liking in about 2-4 hours. That being said I'm always tinkering with my system (much to my wife's dismay).

[aaaantoine]

Less than an hour to get the essentials.

The rest of the installation's life to tweak it just the way I want it. ;)

[Freddy]

It would take me most of the day and more. I use Ubuntu's basesystem with Enlightenment17 from cvs. From there I just keep going adding stuff and then configuring them to work just the way I want.

[Twitch6000]

Probably just 1-2 hours.Reason being, because I like tons of addons and my camera is a bit hard to set up.

[awalsh]

For me it would take about an hour to get everything working how I like it but then about 12 hours to restore my data from backups on externals HDD's but thats because its 1.5tb of various (mainly non essential) files.

[isaacj87]

That's a pretty interesting question and I've thought about it. I had to reinstall Ubuntu a couple of times ;)

It usually depends on how fast the repos are going!

[Corfy]

A few months ago, I got a new harddrive and decided the best thing to do was back up my files that I wanted and reinstall everything from scratch. My system was dual-boot with WinXP and Ubuntu.

First, I used SystemRescueCD to partition my harddrives. I didn't factor that into my time.

I started with XP. All I did was install the base XP, service Pack 2 (which I already had), the security updates (which I had to download), video drivers, audio drivers, other drivers, and anti-virus, firewall, and anti-adware/spyware. That took me three and a half hours, and I had no useful programs installed.

Then I installed Ubuntu. Two hours after I started, I not only had Ubuntu installed with all the updates (which only took 45 minutes), but also all the programs I wanted downloaded and installed as well.

http://corfyscorner.com/node/195

[kuja]

Being as my bandwidth is limitted, it could take me days to get myself back up to date and have all of my packages installed. I tend to have just about all of my configurations backed up though, so that end of it would take less than an hour.

[ntowakbh]

As long as it would take to add some repos and run this:

sudo apt-get install mplayer mozilla-mplayer icedove gcolor2 deluge frostwire opera skype mencoder audacity mediatomb quodlibet recordmydesktop gtk-recordmydesktop
And do some basic configuration (gtk theme, metacity theme, icon theme, etc.). Minimum 20min, max about 1hr 15min. Probably around 30 minutes or so.

And remove the stuff installed by default that I don't use. (like Evolution, Totem, etc.)

[doorknob60]

Most of the day with a totally new installation, not too long with a seperate /home partition. I even used the same /home when I bought a new motherboard, cpu, and installed an amd64 distro instead of an i386 one :-D Works fine once you reinstall your stuff to avoid dead launchers :-P

[starcannon]

I said less than an hour since you said to exclude the install process, post install takes about 30 minutes of my actual time (not counting waiting for updates to finish)

I have an hour and fifteen to an hour and forty-five into an install depending on which computer I'm re-installing. Bout the only time I "re-install" anymore is when I put a new version of Ubuntu on, I don't like upgrade installs on any OS, so I keep /home on its own partition (love that) and just do a full install of the latest stable release.

[Sam Lars]

It usually takes me days and weeks to get it back to where it was...
Then again, I'm always tweaking it so much, it never really gets back to where it was before I start changing it again.

[DougieFresh4U]

It usually takes me days and weeks to get it back to where it was...
Then again, I'm always tweaking it so much, it never really gets back to where it was before I start changing it again.

Some thing like "Keep fixing it till it's broke":lolflag:

[Fingers & Thumbs]

Some thing like "Keep fixing it till it's broke"
+1:lolflag:

As an experimenter, I have had to do this several times (this time I've set up a /home partition) but yes, about an hour to be up and running with everything I need on a day to day basis, and then anything between a few weeks to a couple of months to add all the random crap that will eventually break it again.

[Woormy]

It would take me about half an hour to remember how to set everything up, and half an hour to do it.

[ice60]

i can setup ubuntu very quickly, but to get it just right would take me a few days. just getting opera setup would take me just under an hour because i completely change everything with it. i add extra speed dials, add userjs scripts, bookmarklets, and edit some of the ini files.

setting up apparmor might take me 45 minutes. i use two http proxies that would take a while setting up. i add a lot of things that need setting up and remove a lot too.

i haven't reinstalled my main desktop for about 18 months because i can't bear to go through setting everything up! lol, when i do next do a reinstall it's going to be a rolling release distro, or something with long realease cycles like debian! :|

[akiratheoni]

Hmmm it would take me awhile to reconfigure my Openbox configuration from scratch but if I'm allowed to restore the backup of it then it wouldn't take too long, I'd say an hour, two hours tops.

[HansKisaragi]

Id say under 20 min. :KS

[Vlammetje]

Well I have just reinstalled, thanks to a defective harddisk.I always have a separate /home partition, so even though I had to copy stuff over from the old (and thankfully accessible for now!) HD to the new one, that didn't take long at all.

Even the fact that I decided to swith to KDE all of a sudden didn't mean much more time, even though I have to look where things are hidden in the menus! :lol:

I have one specialty on my system though, I like to use Sony Ericsson Theme Creator. It's great once it's up and running, but it claims to depend on gstreamer 0.8 and although I've installed everything that seemed relevant from the dapper and feisty repos (because 8.04 comes with gstreamer 0.10), I have been quite unable to get things to work. Any tips would be much appreciated.

All in all I've been busy for a while and there are still some annoying little things to fix (such as the ' sign not displaying when I type it) and it's taken me a far longer time than previous reinstalls. Then again, in those days there was no SE theme creator for linux to begin with :p