I am using Linux Mint 9 which is based on Ubuntu Lucid Lynx, a LTS edition with which i am much taken. It is my intention to continue using this and never upgrade even after it has reached it's end of life, which is going to be in April, 2013. To that end i have made a custom ISO with Remastersys (and burned to DVDs)to reinstall with, in the event of a crash. I have been given to understand that repositories for such editions will be shut down after the said expiry. Not a problem, sez i, i would already have all the applications i need, installed on my system and backed up on my custom DVDs. The only snag to my grandiose scheme would be the driver installation should i ever have to reinstall. Is there any way for me to get around this problem? I would extremely grateful is someone can help me prepare for that day, i'm too old and tired to be learning to cope with the likes of Unity and Gnome 3, and somewhat stubborn enough to stay with what i have settled on.

If me. I would look at using the dd command to make a byte by byte copy of my install to a external drive (I have a 1 TB external drive). No need to worry about drivers using this method. Here is a old post of mine on how I do this. My way zips up the backup also.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...6/#post4130531

There is a how to for using dd here on the forum also.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/...ything_With_DD

Hope it helps.

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Dont forget that you would be out of support, and you could have security issues.

Running a linux distro that is totally out of support is probably less risky than running a windows version that is out of support, but personally I wouldnt use either....

Why not just try Xfce? Its fairly close to gnome 2.X, there should be very little learning curve.

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Thank you guys, i was not expecting such a quick response. And rokytnji, i have to say this, you grabbed my problem by the horns and gave me exactly what i wanted, thank you so much. Er..how much of disk space should i be planning for? Mine is a very basic install plus a few light applications.

Edit: Alright, wont bulls**t you..the main reason for my reluctance to upgrade (besides the fact that it is a very stable edition and i have invested a lot of time in customizing it to my liking), is the flash which comes with newer editions, and which does not cache video streams in the /tmp folder. I just cannot do without the convenience of being able to view them with the media player of my choice, when i want.

When an Ubuntu release goes end-of-life, the repositories are moved to the old-releases.ubuntu.com server. So if you wish to continue (highly un-recommended due to the complete lack of security patches and bug fixes!) you can edit your software sources:

Change all of your software sources to http://old-releases.ubuntu.com... for example change this:

to this:

Doing so will allow you to install outdated and unsupported software from the outdated and unsupported end-of-life repositories.

Good luck!

(edit) I should add that the advice above is for Ubuntu. I believe that Mint has an additional repository for mint-specific stuff, and I'm not sure what their policy is for end-of-life.

1 members found this post helpful.

However much space plus maybe 10 percent extra that Mint takes up on partition just to be on the safe side. I don't Mint but there should be a disk usage analyzer in Mint to figure this out.

Practice first, and see how much space is left over on recovery partition with tar file showing and re size to adjust.

Edit: I should have said I shrink my partition on install first to get it as close to installed files as possible before making a backup.

Nyaaaah..rokytnji had me down to a tee, not that i don't appreciate all the other alternatives with the appropriate statutory warnings :wink:, a 60 GB external drive should do for me i think...

Get a flash video downloader.