Usually I strongly recommend against re-installing. I think it is Windows policy: restart for small problems, re-install for larger problems.

I have a computer I use in my home cinema. It is equipped with an Athlon 2000+ processor I think. Given this processor it must date back to 2004 or so. It should be one of the first computers I used when I switched to Linux on the desktop. That time Debian Sarge was the testing release.

Over the years the installation got updated and upgraded.

As movie formats became more complicated, including H264 encoding, the processor lacked power for proper decoding. A few years ago I installed a GeForce 8400 AGP card for better decoding performance.

There was a lot of trouble with the Open Source Nvidia drivers, and installing the proprietary drivers, in the Debian way or not. Or removing the drivers, or solving dependencies. And mixing stable, testing and unstable releases. Some movies would be played properly only with Mplayer, others only by VLC, some movies by neither one.

More and more movies became problematic. In mplayer sound could be unsynchronized by minutes (!), and VLC would play 2 frames a second. While on other computers with Atom processors and a several times more powerful NVidia GPU's the movies would play.

So before scrapping this old computer I decided to try another last attempt and make a clean installation, solving all NVidia, vpdau, vlc and mplayer problems.

I installed plain stable Debian Wheezy. Did not worry about any special or proprietary driver. Obviously included the non-free pool. KDE4.

The free nouveau driver is installed. The machine runs like a dream. Mplayer plays H264 movies smoothly. Sound is in perfect sync.

OK, maybe I should refine my position somewhat. After 10 years and 4 or 5 release updates and you suffer unexplainable problems, dependency hell and traces of upgrading and downgrading, you might want to consider a disk wipe and clean install.

jlinkels

Thank you for sharing your experience. I just needed some clarification. Re-installation is it possibly dependent upon only the linux distribution (debian or fedora). I have faced the problem of removing python 2.7 from Ubuntu 12.04.2. As a result everything went topsy-turvy. Only after reinstallation was the problem sorted.

Now my final query is that ultimately, reinstallation is it the ONLY solution in worst case ?

Thanking you,

ntu929.

I had to do a complete reinstall once to solve an issue. I had a power failure, and no UPS at the time. When power was restored, I booted up the machine. I quickly found out that I was having issues accessing the Internet. Discovered something was wrong with my DNS, and could only access things by IP address. I had tried reinstalling every package related seemed related to DNS, and checked the configs. Still couldn't manage to get DNS to work. Eventually gave up and reinstalled.

In almost 20 years I've had too many, many times but after practice comes perseverance and knowing to take precautions like firewalls, backups and on plus Linuces get better fast with the world jumping in. Now a days I do not have to reinstall hardly ever.

I think technically any problem is solvable without a reinstall but sometimes a lack of knowledge or patience means a reinstall is quicker. If a problem looks like it will take longer than a reinstall to solve then I'd go for the reinstall.

More links to links to links: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ux-4175490919/