What's the difference between an installation of ubuntu that has been upgraded for a couple years versus a completely new fresh install of a new version? I've been upgrading since my fresh install of 10.4 LTS and I'm thinking forward to upcoming ubuntu 12.4 LTS in April. Will the upgrade path be equivalent to a fresh install?

As a practical matter, I have installed and carefully configured a few dozens applications since installing ubuntu 10.4 and setting up my linux software development system on that computer. If I install a fresh new ubuntu, just getting all the search paths and compile/link options configured on my codeblocks development environment alone would be a major hassle, and that's only one of many applications.

I'm sure almost everyone faces this issue. In the past I've always performed a fresh install and suffered through several days of getting everything to work properly again. Have I been stupid? I hope so, because I'm so tired of that.

What are the tradeoffs of both approaches (automatic upgrades versus a fresh install)?

Hello,

I'm not an Ubuntu user myself but having spend quite some time on forums I've noticed that an Ubuntu upgrade never comes with the necessary hassle, trouble and loss of functionality. For as far as I'm concerned a fresh install is always the better choice. I do understand your concerns about configuration, installation and the time you've spend on it. But there are simple enough solutions to automate the necessary steps. DPKG itself comes with the options --get-selections and --set-selections which will, in combination with apt-get, install the same software packages on your newly installed system. After that you'll only need to copy over your configuration files (backup up the originals installed by the new packages for safe keeping and eventual trouble-shooting) and you'll have a running system again, using the newer version. Since in Linux everything results to a file, your search paths, compile and link options, and lots more can easily be copied for safe keeping and used on your new system.

Kind regards,

Eric

PS: Here's a link to an example using dpkg and apt as I mentioned: http://www.tuxradar.com/content/linu...ek-should-know. Hope it helps.

During my Ubuntu adventure I upgraded twice and would never do it again. Upgrades leave behind old (read useless) files etc that can cause issues in the new version. A clean install is exactly that, clean. There is no old materials left behind that interfere with the new settings.

Now if you do as Eric suggested and back up all your settings etc (especially your /home) you should for all intents and purposes have a trouble free ride BUT if you backup and then replace new files with old ones (that may have different format to the new files) you may have some problems to deal with. That is why research is best done before hand so you can minimise time and effort restoring your personalisations.

In theory, there should be no difference between a dist-upgrade and a fresh install. However, as EricTRA and k3lt01 said, in practice dist-upgrades of Ubuntu can be fraught with problems. I always do clean installs of Ubuntu and I never have problems.
As a rough rule of thumb, the more highly customized your Ubuntu installation is (i.e., the more your Ubuntu installation differs from a standard installation with standard packages from the Ubuntu repos) then the greater risk of failure in doing a dist-upgrade.
If you have added third party repositories to your sources.list or your /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ directory, and this includes those all too often problematic PPA repos, then you increase your risk of problems with doing a dist-upgrade.
Here is a good explanation of how using dpkg like this works to reinstall the packages you want after a doing a clean install of Ubuntu: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...75&postcount=5
And if your /home directory is on a separate partition, then all of your user specific configuration files and folders in your /home directory will survive a clean install and be carried over to the new install.

If you have done dist-upgrades since 10.04 and have had no problems then good for you! If it is not broke, then do not worry about fixing it. Just go ahead and dist-upgrade to 12.04 when it is released.

As an alternative to upgrading with each new release every 6 months, you can just dist-upgrade from each LTS (long term support) release to the next one. For example, you could install and configure Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and then dist-upgrade to the next LTS release (which will be 12.04) when it is released in April 2012.
The LTS releases of Ubuntu are supported for at least 3 years for the desktop versions; and new LTS versions are released every 2 years.

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I can't find it now but apparently they are making it a flat 5 years of support for each LTS (Desktop and Server).

I have upgraded and gone with clean installs. Both work. Clean installs work best.

This is something you have to decide for yourself.

As mentioned by tommcd ppa's can be a problem. If you have any in your sources.list and have had successful upgrades you have been extremely lucky.

If you go the upgrade route you should, at a minimum comment out the ppa's. Better yet remove them and all their works. Put them back after you upgrade your version. Ubuntu mentions this somewhere in their documentation and recommends complete reversion to repo versions of everything. If you think about it this makes sense.

I think maybe my terminology is misleading. The ubuntu software center updates software very often, and that's been happening since I first installed ubuntu64 10.04 about 21 months ago. I notice that updates the kernels too. That's what I meant when I talked about upgrading the past 21 months.

In contrast, I have never explicitly stated anything like "I want to upgrade from ubuntu 10.04 to ubuntu 10.10 or 11.04 or 11.10". I guess my first question should be what's the difference between letting these every day~week updates happen for 6 months (to the next release date) and a fresh install of the next release.

I guess you could ask it this way. What's the difference between installing 10.04, then doing absolutely nothing with the computer for 6 months except let the normal upgrade process run every day~week... versus a brand new installation of the next release? In both cases nothing exists on the disk except what is installed as part of the initial release.

As much as it pains me, my tendency is to agree with the consensus and continue my long-standing practice of re-installing and re-configuring all applications after the new fresh install of 12.04 LTS when the time comes. Some of your tips should make that a bit easier than it has been in the past.

Yes, some things I can probably just copy across, like the various configuration files that control aspects of the codeblocks development system. I can probably just copy my whole "/home/max/project/" directory for instance.

I wonder though. I've had to install a few dozen headers and shared libraries while developing software applications. So, for instance, I've got a boatload of OpenGL related files in various places, plus other files to support freetype2, libpng, cairo, pango, glib, pcap, zlib, and who knows how many others. Is there some quick and dirty way to simply create a list of files that exist in the old filesystem but not in the new one? I know there will be a bunch of OS files that I don't care about in that list, but I'd likely recognize the names of almost all of the additional directories and files I've added during software development.

You are surely not installed on one partition are you?

If you are installed on 2 partitions, / (root) and /home a clean install just gives you a new / partition leaving all your non system files untouched.

I have, for instance, as my "secure" business install Debian Squeeze. This started life as Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Horny Horse). All I did was to remove to another directory all my "hidden" config files from my /home/<user name> directory.

Actually used some of them after switching to Squeeze. Bookmarks and play lists for Music mainly.

Your auto update/upgrade cycles are not from the software center they are from Update Manager. They can be turned off or only used for security updates. I, personally, do not use Update Mangler but I think most folks do.

maxreason, all Ubuntu 10.04 packages/applications are "frozen" for stability at their April 2010 version. You only get bug fixes/security patches to the versions you have installed, never new versions.

Therefore 10.04 will always be a distinct entity from 10.10 (Oct. 2010 release), 11.04 (April 2011 release), etc. Regular updates will not bring you up-to-date with later releases; they will only make what you already have more safe & secure.

My old 1TB hard drive has four partitions (including the swap partition):
/ (root)
/boot
/backup
swap

I'm thinking my new 3TB drive should probably be:
/
/boot
/home
swap

I'm not sure why I created a separate /backup partition 2 years ago.

I did not realize that a fresh, clean install would leave the entire /home tree unchanged (rather than clear it out). That's very cool. Of course, most likely I'll be performing the new clean install of ubuntu 12.04 LTS on my new 3TB drive. But presumably I get the same result by simply copying over the entire contents of the /home directory once the installation is complete. Right???

Maybe something similar works on the /usr directory tree, where lots of my header files and other software development files are probably stored.

I suspect my biggest problem is remembering where all the shared libraries got stored for things like OpenGL, freetype2, libpng, glib, zlib, and so forth.

Thanks much for the very clear statement of how that stuff works!

Yes you can copy all that stuff from the /home directory. Make sure that you do get rid of the ~/.hidden files first (some of them will not copy anyway do to permissions) or you may cause some config problems.

Keeping any of the ~/.hidden files you want in a different place would be very safe.

I am big on large / (root) partitions and ample /home partitions but partitioning a 3TB drive for a single install seems a bit big to me.

I would consider using maybe 60GB for / and 300 to 500GB for /home and what ever you need for swap. The rest of the drive could then be used for 2 or 3 (or 20) storage partitions dedicated to one type of files (documents, music, photos, video, whatever).

That way those files are not in your OS, are easily accessible and less prone to breaking down because you are copying them from OS to OS. Files will not last forever but copying them from here to there will speed up their breaking down.

Why 60GB for root? That seems like quite a lot. My Ubuntu root partition has never used more than about 4GB of space. Even my Slackware root partition is currently only 7.7GB; and a full install of Slackware includes a lot of stuff. I allocate 20GB for the root partitions on my desktop and that has been way more than enough.
My laptop has a smaller hard drive, so I only allocate 10GB for the root partitions and I have never come close to filling them.

Well, the OP is talking about a single installation on a 3T drive. That is not big that is huge.

My / partition on this, the OS I use for everyday work, was new in November of 2010 as a clean install of Debian testing. It has a 31G / partition that has, according to Gparted, 4.12GiB currently free. I do have a lot of programs on here, and a lot of other things that go in the system files.

With Wheezy going into freeze this month, I am looking for ward to another clean install when it goes "stable". My / partition will be bigger.

It will not, probably be 60G. I do not have a 3T HDD either. If I did have a drive of that size I would probably give my / partition 100G just to make sure that it would always have breathing room.

This is an interesting subject and as a relatively new Linux user (2009) I have found it very interesting. I think that most people would probably agree with you on the size of the / partition.

I have found that on an OS that I use the standard recommendation or 10 to 15 gigs is just not enough for me at all. I do have an older computer that has fine working installation on its 5 gig HDD, in 2 partitions even. It does have another, later installed 10 gig drive that holds the data now.

So, my recommendation of 60 gigs for / is, I feel, a safe, conservative recommendation for that large a drive. If I had a drive like that I would probably only use about 300 gigs, total for the entire OS and I am not sure that is needed if you are storing your data in separate partitions. The 60 gigs for / is just for comfort that anything that may want to be installed will have plenty of room.

ISO images take a good bit of room. All Ubuntu images boot easily through grub with no need to install or burn a disk. I don't even use Ubuntu but have 6 images in my /etc/aa directory (they must be on a / partition for grub to deal with them) just so that I can see what they are up to.

Being new to Linux I am also constantly trying out new things. Right now I have a lot of video editing applications installed as it is something I have never worked with and want to learn about. Some will stay and some will go.

Things do build up over time.

I like a fairly clean and lean install when I install. I use the netinstall image. Bloat is something I install on my own to cater to my interests. I think a feller with a monster drive should have the option of doing that.

I broke my system on an upgrade today, so I'm going to put in a vote for a fresh install.