A Kubuntu Reinstall How-to?

[Hoary]

Hello, I'm a dumb newbie. I installed the AMD-64 version of DD a month or so ago. I could then easily do such humdrum things as change the screen resolution and install a printer driver (unfortunately the wrong driver). Now, however, I cannot. (My thread describing this in more/horrible detail is here.) I'm mystified by this, as I've not knowingly done anything in any way unusual. Still, I'm sadly coming to the conclusion that I'll need to do a reinstall.

Of course I could:

1. back up the email mailboxes, important files, etc., that I already have,
2. install Kubuntu in the regular way (zapping everything)
3. install needed utilities (e.g. for me, Japanese input) and other software
4. restore my email and files the way I want them
5. reconfigure lots of things the way I want them

That's what I did a month ago when I moved from SuSE/reiserfs on one physical drive to Kubuntu/ext3 on another. Stages 1-2 were a bit boring but OK. Stages 3-5 were a major waste of time and pain in the orifice. Do I have to go through this rigmarole again? Gah!

Surely a Kubuntu reinstall can't take so long. (If it were, why would there be any celebration when a new version comes out? Or do you people employ teenagers for the mcjob of getting an installation into a usable, convenient state?) Can one write the kernel/GNU/KDE/etc stuff on top of the old, somehow leaving unchanged such things as Kontact mailboxes and filtering? Or is there some guide to doing such things as backing up Kontact data (message boxes, filtering, messages etc.) to a state from which they can simply restored? Or what else should I be doing?

Thanks for any help!

[bootdoc]

Re: A Kubuntu Reinstall How-to?

if you manually edited the partition table to have a separte /home partition then you can reinstall kubuntu without disturbing /home as long as you use the same sizes. For example, I always edit the partitions so that swap is 1024m and / is at least 3072m and the rest of the drive is /home. This way if I have to reinstall kubuntu I can set up the drive exactly the same way but do not format /home. I have done this twice (2 different machines) with dapper with no problems. All your settings and data remain.
Charlie

[Hoary]

Re: A Kubuntu Reinstall How-to?

Damn, that's one of many things I didn't think about when I installed DD. I'd pretty much forgotten what I'd done, but I now see that I have hda1 as a swap partition and hda2 as an ext3 partition; presumably the latter includes /home

I can't claim that there's anything esoteric about this; it's explained for newbies right here. (If I'm right, though, it would mean that I couldn't have two similarly arranged installations on a single physical drive: three primary partitions times two equals six, one more than the max.)

Well, your message was bad news. But in the medium term it's going to be very useful, so many thanks for it.