Upgrade or full re-install? advice needed!

[henge]

A little different perspective, and probably irrelevant to the original question, but...

I am absolutely fanatical about NOT doing a "clean" install. I have, over the years, put a great deal of research, time, and effort into getting my system to work the way I want, and having the software I want, much of it locally compiled. Any OS that needs to be rebuilt from scratch at every upgrade, and all of the added software reinstalled is, well, windows, and that's the main reason I bailed from the windows world years ago.

That being said, as others have mentioned, be ready for potholes in the roadway. You probably don't need to zap the whole ~/.kde directory, and if you did that, you would lose all of your settings -- basically nothing to do with kde will work, including menus, etc, until you reinstall everything. But do be ready for the usual problem that plasma widgets more often than not are not compatible (and this goes also for the major kde upgrade that occurs during the middle of the kubuntu upgrade cycle). I routinely delete the ~/.kde/share/config/plasma* files, which winds up killing the panel, widgets, and desktop background, but usually leaves kde bootable.

Also in case of recent releases where lightdm has been substituted for kdm, you will still be using kdm, and will have to install all the lightdm stuff manually. That's fine with me, I don't like lightdm, and have kdm working exactly the way I want it.

You can fix the repository problem with:

cd /etc/apt/sources.list.d
sudo rpl --dry-run "precise" "quantal" *list

run this, check the output, and then run it again with the --dry-run part rubbed out
to do it for real.
You could run the same utility on your /etc/apt/sources.list file:

cd /etc/apt
sudo rpl --dry-run "precise" "quantal" ./sources.list

again checking the output, and then rubbing out the --dry-run part to make it work.

PS I have found lowercase "quantal" works fine, but I suppose "Quantal" is the correct form.

Ahh, if only i had seen your post before i decided to go ahead and do a full install and i may just have gone along the upgrade route.....
i now seem to have a new problem that makes my akonadi problems fade into insignificance
Essentially, the continual errors on the disk partition are forcing the new root filesystem to be readonly...a bloody nightmare.
details (and expert input hopfefully) can be found here:
http://www.kubuntuforums.net/showthr...878#post312878

[doctordruidphd]

Note: rpl has to be installed in order for this to work.

Yes, and it's worth it, rpl is a LOT easier to work with than sed.

[Spadge]

Wow. Installing 12.10 will be (has been?) your eighth upgrade. Impressive.

I did the same sort of thing on FreeBSD. Every upgrade required recompiling everything from source and all the system files merging using mergemaster.

It's one of the few things I don't miss about FreeBSD.

[dmeyer]

I always recommend reinstall (I try upgrade every release though.) Just always works out to be less hassle for me. Also I nuke .config, .kde, .cache, .local and .pulse. That way I get a nice shiny install with no problems from my old setup carried over. Setting up akonadi and kmail/kontact all over again is a pain but it just never migrates well between installations/upgrades.

If people aren't up to reinstalling though then I sort of insist they nuke those directories because if I don't I seem to run into problems occasionally. For people with crazy customization I might understand not nuking those directories but hey, their call.

Gnome 3 isn't all bad. Although I personally thinks it terrible, I've found a lot of people who think its fantastic on a laptop (most probably run 3.4 so they haven't had to face the newest wave of touchification.) There are some design issues but most (not all) can be fixed with a few extensions. At the very least, its something else and we shouldn't complain about having variety.

8 releases? Wow! That's epic... I think thats the best I've ever seen (except some Arch people who claim to have run the same install since 0.7 (early 2005). Though they have a habit of over exaggerating.

[james147]

I think thats the best I've ever seen (except some Arch people who claim to have run the same install since 0.7 (early 2005). Though they have a habit of over exaggerating.

I don't find that too hard to beleive, ArchLinux has the advantage of small incromental updates so dosn't have the issue of one large update twice a year like ubuntu does. It is also more transparent with whats changing and so I find it easier to fix when it does go wrong.

But successful upgrades on ubuntu also depend on how much you have customised your install (extra ppa's tend to screw things up allot) and how long you wait before you upgrade. More upgrades fail in the first few weeks of after release then later on as they find and fix the bugs with the process so the best thing to do is wait a while before upgrading if you don't want to have to reinstall and remove any customisations you have made with the ppas.

[doctordruidphd]

Actually, I usually begin the upgrade process as soon as the new repositories open. I have three partitions on my main disk, named stable, testing, and experimental. The newest release (13.04 when I get around to it) goes into experimental, and it stays there until at least after the next kde bump. Then it moves into testing, and stays there usually until a couple weeks before the official release. If by then it isn't stable enough to run, there's a big problem. I also keep the most recent LTS on another disk. And I keep all of that stuff up to date.

The only REAL problem I ever had was, as I recall, the upgrade to Maverick. The bloody thing just wouldn't boot, no matter what I did, and this was right up until about the last month before its official release. I finally figured out the reason was that a change in the boot-up disk mounting meant that if disks listed in fstab with the auto option weren't actually there, the system would freeze. That was something of a cliff-hanger until I got if figured out. There are always glitches with dependencies not being there, need for running dpkg --force-overwrite, etc., but I have learned how to use apt from the command line and most of that has become thoroughly survivable.

The only real problem is that the system has grown in size tremendously -- up to close to 30gb, but a lot of that is -dev packages, plus my own bad habit of installing everything I read about on daily Linux Forums Daily News just to try it, and then forget it's there. I periodically go through and flush that stuff out, but still the system has become large. Not much I can do about the dev stuff, given my insistence on compiling stuff my own way, but that's why we're on Linux, after all.

Edit: One thing I forgot to mention, and it's the most important:

BACKUP, STUPID!

Theres a long story to that, but the gist is that I have multiple backups of everything on several plug-in drives. Don't try this kind of thing without them.