Hi all,

I'd like to upgrade from Edgy to the Feisty goodness, but my auto update won't complete - and I think it has to do with it choking on my manual Wine install.

Do I need to backup my home partition and reformat everything to upgrade to Feisty?

I have a USB HD, but I've never backed up my home partition yet.

Is there a tutorial out there that can guide me through the small details, eg., hot to format my USB HD, does the partition size matter as long as it is bigger than my home drive, how can i test my back up before blowing up my main drive, etc...

tia...

Copy your whole /home/username directory (including all the files that start with a dot) to a safe place, that'll copy all your personal data (unless you're saving them wildly troughout the system as root) and most if not all your personal settings (background, app settings, ...). After a reinstallion, just copy the files back and maybe run a chown to make sure they belong to the correct user. System-wide settings are stored in /etc or some place else in the system, but unless you've done huge manual modifications to them, there's no need to backup them.

It'd be good to have /home on it's separate partition, then you wouldn't have to format it during reinstallation of Linux (any).

Wine installation should not matter. If it's about that, simply remove it, do the upgrade and reinstall Wine (trough apt-get following the steps in wineHQ site).

i do not recommend upgrading & trying to preserve software packages, most likely the wine package and any other software package built to run in Edgy were compiled on an Edgy box that has different versions of gcc & glibc so the packages will more than likely not run or run poorly on Feisty if they work at all, i suggest saving only personal files in your home directory (photos & graphics, Documents & text files, bookmarks, audio & video files) and doing a clean install so there is no Edgy software to cause problems with Feisty...

I'd have to agree with the above. I've never *upgraded* Ubuntu, just keep good backups of my important stuff, and do a clean install.

I've done it this way since Dapper, and actually, I never *upgraded* an MS OS either, always did clean installs. I done an upgrade on Windows one time, and my PC's performance took a major hit. I bought a full version, and it was fine after that.

IGF

Excellent advice from all. I hadn't thought it through enough to realize there might be problems.

I know what to do in order to get some Feisty goodness now.

Thanks,

GNewbie

Actually Ubuntu is one of the rare distributions that are actually likely to upgrade (using package manager) to a newer version. From Edgy onwards it should actually "support" this; package manager should tell you when there's a new Ubuntu available and ask if you'd like to upgrade to it. LTS versions should only upgrade to LTS versions, and the non-LTS versions to the next newer version. I've upgraded Ubuntu by this way, and didn't have any notable problems..maybe merging the new and old configuration files, but that's something you'd have to do anyway, with a clean install (re-modify settings to your liking). I have also upgraded Fedora, twice, using it's package manager even though it doesn't "officially" support or encourage doing that if I'm right. No problems there either. I think it's fairly safe thing to do, if the system is as close as possible to the "original one", i.e. no heavy customizations done, like manually installed/compiled software.

I think that's very nice, people could upgrade their OS without formatting and such - that's the way to go with a precompiled binary operating system. However I do still recommend, if possible, doing a clean install (with formatting of root filesystem) instead of that, since it's likely that the system has some modifications made, and it's overall safer to download the discs, check they're all right before installation and so on, than start downloading and wait for a dead connection before the downloading is finished (it's recoverable, but not something I'd like to do all the time).

Shortly, if you haven't edited the system or it's packages much after the initial install (except for normal updates from Ubuntu reposities), it's safe to try the "software upgrade". Should you encounter problems or think it's just safer, and can afford downloading and burning the new install disc set, the traditional way of formatting + installing is probably good. In either case, backups of your important files - not including any program files re-fetchable from the web - are something you should really do before anything else. I recommend taking backups even if you think you're running fine and don't plan to do anything like this.

As a sidenote, I have too (tried to..) upgraded Windows. It was Win95 -> 98, which of course ended in a catastrophe. The system did boot after the upgrade, and seemed mostly fine, but it was crashing horribly, felt slow and popped up nasty warnings and errors. A new sum of money consumed to a complete (non-upgrade) version of W98, a clean install and no trouble and I mean it; it worked better than my Ubuntu machine today. Actually the very same Win98 was still running a little over month ago, and though it felt slow compared to the newer computer beside it, it did work. By the time there had already grown unrecoverable errors and such, but it still ran.