best upgrade path for the newbie.

[Tezuka27]

Hi all - I'm an absolute noob trying to upgrade my son's machine (Dell Pentium 4) from gutsy 7.10 to whatever's feasible, as it has, unfortunately, become our only functioning computer. My chief concern is preserving the material now on the machine, which consists mainly of user generated artwork and text files.

I would be satisfied with getting the machine to a state where the latest version of Firefox (7.0.1) functions properly and being able to run a Canon printer and scanner would be desirable also.

I've been searching through the forums and have come away with the impression that a full upgrade will be a nightmare, so any advice/and or instructions that can get me to the minimum functionality stated above will be greatly appreciated. I have almost 0 experience with Ubuntu. I spent the majority of the '90s on Silicon Graphics unix machines, but I'm afraid the last decade has been Windows for me.

Any and all help/advice/etc is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
john

[Snowhog]

Re: best upgrade path for the newbie.

Upgrading from Gutsy to Natty (the latest non-development release) is not going to be simply, if even possible. The best advice would be to do a clean install of Natty from a LiveCD, keeping the /home partition (not formatting it). That is assuming that /home is on a separate partition. Is it?

It would be helpful to see how the HDD is configured. Can you post the contents of the /etc/fstab file?

[woodsmoke]

Re: best upgrade path for the newbie.

Hi
And welcome to the forum.

I might ask some questions and make two suggestions.

I assume that you have Gutsy on the machine since you want to "upgrade".

a) What, particularly is the size of the hard drive?

If it is relatively large, say 50 gb or up one could easily download the latest Kubu and do a dual boot.

b) You wrote:

My chief concern is preserving the material now on the machine, which consists mainly of user generated artwork and text files.

The simplest answer here is to move ALL files to "documents" let us say and simply COPY them to a usb stick, a dvd or an external drive before doing the dual boot.

This then produces the simplest overall answer which is to just download Natty and either dual boot or install over Gutsy.

But, since you say you have little experience, it might be best to do the dual boot(VERY EASY) after copying all files to the external drive. Then you have the "tried and true" Gutsy with which to work and can fiddle with natty while also having the materials on the external medium.

An added advantage of the dual boot, if all goes well is that, one should, be able to simply COPY the files from the Gutsy partition to the Natty partition.

If Natty works well then again, just do a full install on the whole hard drive and copy the data back onto the hard drive from the external medium.

Dual boots really are nothing to worry about, they have functioned well for years now and most folks here have many OSs multi booted on a hard drive at one time or another.

just some thoughts.

woodsmoke

[Tezuka27]

Re: best upgrade path for the newbie.

@Snowhog:
Thanks - it took me a while as I can't remember half of my old unix commands, but I finally found a way to make dolphin do it.

/etc/fstab contents:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
# /dev/sda1
UUID=d98f5fb5-fb35-4c10-81de-d46287d5f06f / ext3 defaults,errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /dev/sda5
UUID=f27d1e2c-52e4-442a-ab62-3a382ab7daba none swap sw 0 0
/dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec 0 0



@Woodsmoke:
I believe the hard drive is 39 Gigs. Sorry, I'm not sure how much is full, but I'll try to figure out how to get those numbers. I believe I'll start dumping his files to some memory sticks as a precursor to the new software adventure. Thanks much.

john

[Tezuka27]

Re: best upgrade path for the newbie.

Sorry - it says that I have 25.8 Gigs open on the drive.

thanks,
john

[Snowhog]

Re: best upgrade path for the newbie.

Okay, so you don't have a separate /home partition. Unless you use a partitioner such as GParted to make space available and create one, then performing a fresh install is out of the question, as it will completely wipe out your user specific data.

[oshunluvr]

Re: best upgrade path for the newbie.

My advice would be to partition the hard drive using a live Gparted CD: Shrink the current boot partition and create a 12GB partition and install Kubuntu (or whatever distro you want) into the new partition.

During install, specify your Gutsy partition as /home and don't format it.

This will leave you with the old install still bootable and the new install on it's own partition.
Your new home directories will be on the old partition along with all the old Gutsy install and all your old home directories intact.

Then, once you've determined that the new install works, simply move your personal data from the old home (now under /home/home/<USERNAME>) into your new home at /home/<USERNAME> and delete the old Gusty files.

Voila! you have a new install and a separate /home and you never had to move the files off the hard drive.

Of course: One always makes a backup of anything important. Although Gparted and Ubiquity (the Kubuntu installer) are very stable these days, you never know what gremlins are lurking...

[ardvark71]

Re: best upgrade path for the newbie.

Hi all - I'm an absolute noob trying to upgrade my son's machine (Dell Pentium 4) from gutsy 7.10 to whatever's feasible, as it has, unfortunately, become our only functioning computer. My chief concern is preserving the material now on the machine, which consists mainly of user generated artwork and text files.

Hi John...

Welcome to the forums

I personally would hold off doing any upgrades until you get another functioning computer going in your household, if at all possible.

[Tezuka27]

Re: best upgrade path for the newbie.

Thanks for all the helpful advice - it's appreciated. As I tried to figure out how to accomplish this, I probably have strayed from the path that most, if not all, of you wished me to take.

What I've done is downloaded the ISO of Kubuntu 11.04 with the intention of transferring it to a USB flash drive via USB-Creator to make it bootable, which after checking over, I could install from. It now appears that USB-Creator isn't available in Gutsy, which is the version running on this machine. I'm currently downloading 1.16 of USB-Creator in the hopes that it will run on Gutsy. Is there another method to reach my goal (I assume there is)?

Thanks again,

john

[Snowhog]

Re: best upgrade path for the newbie.

Does the PC have a CD-RW drive in it? Or can you get to one that does? If yes to either, then the instructions to Install Ubuntu 7.10 to a Flash Drive via CD might be of use.

[Jonas]

Re: best upgrade path for the newbie.

My advice would /.../

Voila! you have a new install and a separate /home and you never had to move the files off the hard drive.

Simple, yet brilliant! I'll keep that one in mind!

Dell Pentium 4 with 40 GB HD, sound like a rather old machine, 512 RAM? If so ...I would however suggest a less demanding OS then K/Ubuntu - perhaps Xubuntu (and still be able to take advantage of this brilliant forum)

http://www.xubuntu.org/

Jonas

[oshunluvr]

Re: best upgrade path for the newbie.

512kb is enough for Kubuntu, but likely won't do the desktop compositing very well, meaning fancy stuff like window transparency won't work well.

Certainly, X or L - ubuntu will work just fine.

[bsniadajewski]

Re: best upgrade path for the newbie.

512kb ?

[oshunluvr]

Re: best upgrade path for the newbie.

lol... showing my age... 512MB

My first computer had 4kb

[Tezuka27]

Re: best upgrade path for the newbie.

256

john