Any Need to Uninstall Any Programs Before an Upgrade from K7.10

[ultrageeky]

I'm interested in upgrading to Kubuntu 8.04. I currently use Kubuntu 64bit 7.10 on an 64bit AMD x2 Atholon system.

I know that 8.04 has a lot of innovations built into the GUI that previously 3rd party programs would cover i.e in 7.10, iso management programs, codecs, components of Compiz, the official Wine dist. and other programs needed to be installed

To prevent unnecessary software from being on my computer and incompatibility issues from cropping up, should I remove any particular programs or program types before I upgrade? Also, should I remove any of my additional, non standard, repositories?

[dibl]

Re: Any Need to Uninstall Any Programs Before an Upgrade from K7.10

You should definitely save your data in a different partition that the one where the OS is, because you may need to install the 8.04 OS from a CD.

Kubuntu updates are less than 100% trouble-free, unfortunately -- you can find plenty of posts on this forum about problems with updates. My one experience doing an update was from 7.04 to 7.10, and the main requirement was a ton of patience -- it downloaded 950 packages and took the better part of an hour to finish, on a broadband cable connection. So, you need to resist the impulse to declare it "locked" and just let it sit.

[ultrageeky]

Re: Any Need to Uninstall Any Programs Before an Upgrade from K7.10

I keep all my documents and media on a separate hard drive so I'm fine in that respect. If I back-up my Home directory, should anything go wrong, is it correct that I can just replace any new one with my old one? Will this re-instate installed programs? And is their a way to back-up a listing of all the programs I have installed on my system?

Thank you for your advice to be patient, I will be. I don't mind wiping my hard drive and installing from scratch as long as I know I can get my accustomed functionality re-installed into the new system (I've spent a lot of time configuring this one to make it as usable for its purpose as I need).

[ultrageeky]

Re: Any Need to Uninstall Any Programs Before an Upgrade from K7.10

Have another question, if it all goes wrong, can I undo the upgrade through terminal/console/text prompt?

[dibl]

Re: Any Need to Uninstall Any Programs Before an Upgrade from K7.10

Nope. When you click "Dist Upgrade" you are committed -- there's no going back that I've ever heard of, short of re-using your 7.10 installation CD.

On the re-use of /home, there is a down side to doing that, but basically "yes", you can. The downside is, if you don't happen to want all of the same "settings" in 8.04 that you had in 7.10, too bad -- they will all be there anyway. Although it's a lot of configuration work, you might want to consider the advantages of setting up 8.04 from scratch, and getting it the way you actually want it, versus learning later that there were other possibilities that you didn't take advantage of. So the tradeoff is, speed of setup (just copy the settings) versus taking full advantage of everything that HH offers, some of which will be new and different.

[ultrageeky]

Re: Any Need to Uninstall Any Programs Before an Upgrade from K7.10

Definitely something to think about (install from scratch). I'm assuming the extra repo's will need to be changed upon upgrade. I have FEBE installed into Firefox so I should be able to re-instate my Firefox plug-ins and bookmarks. And I have a program called Package Back-Up Tool that will write the programs in my install cache to disk (I cleaned it once though!!!).

I think that if I could get a total listing of all the programs I have installed on my system then I'd definitely go for a fresh install and that way I could fully check my installation drive for faults and remove a partition I no longer need.

[dibl]

Re: Any Need to Uninstall Any Programs Before an Upgrade from K7.10

Yep, I always export my Firefox bookmarks as an HTML file and save it on my USB thumb drive. Other data is on other partitions of the hard drives. Of late, I have not seen the benefit of re-using the /home directory, for the reasons stated above, except that VMWare Player seems a lot happier if it can have the VM there rather than a different disk partition. So I make a partition for the OS, including /home, of about 20GB, which allows for my 10GB VM plus the rest of the OS and plenty of extra space. The rest of my data is on a different partition, and I make "links" or symlinks to the "Documents" and "Pictures" and "Videos" and whatnot that are in my /home directory.

[ultrageeky]

Re: Any Need to Uninstall Any Programs Before an Upgrade from K7.10

I like your thinking. I've been toying with the idea of setting-up my computer such that certain directories are on different drives so that the OS can read info from several drives simultaneously. I'm aware of RAID but I don't see the point of having data duplicated across several drives unless the data is highly important (an OS can always be re-installed whereas non-OS data cannot always be easily recovered); I'd prefer to only have drives and partitions hold different components of the OS so as to decrease the load times (and read/write times) of OS components.

At the moment though, my ambitions for my computer are beyond my knowledge of Linux so until I've learned more I'll have to stick with what I know.