hi all,

i'm moving from edgy eft to gutsy gibbon. please comment on my upgrade strategy - good or bad.

1. back up home drive.
2. install gutsy over edgy leaving my home partition alone to keep all my personal settings.

another option would be to just save all my important files and wipe my home drive, too. i could then import all my saved important files. is there any advantage to doing this over saving my home drive?

tia...

This is just my opinion, but I've had much better luck with a fresh install, and I always keep my /home on a seperate partition, and I've never had any problems. (Didn't overwrite /home, I'm trying to say.) One of the advantages of debian is that when upgrading you don't have to do a fresh install, but some of the changes ubuntu makes means that the upgrade doesn't always go as smoothly as it does with a pure debian setup, so they made an upgrade tool. I've never used it, but I've read good things about it. I'd just google it, pick the option your gut likes, and grin and bare it. As long as you have your data backed up, you aren't risking that much. Best of luck...

So, I'd do a fresh install, without hosing your /home. Works for me.

David

One other small point to consider, if you do decide to do the Edgy to Gutsy upgrade, is that there was another version in between the two - Feisty. It is normal to do upgrades one step at a time. So before upgrading to Gutsy (which I'm really liking) you would normally be doing an upgrade to Feisty. One more small chance of something going wrong. Personally I agree with Budword, as I think most users would... save your files and do a brand new installation of Gutsy. Do a bit of research on where your email messages and mail are stored first. With some programs they're stored in unobvious places, because they're stored as hidden files. Also some people back up not only their /home directory but also their /var and (I think its) their /etc directories. I usually prefer to have two hard drives for different versions of Ubuntu (and one for windoze) and install my new version of Ubuntu on the drive, which had my second last Ubuntu system on it. This lets me have that drive automatically set up as the default drive to boot into, gives me a pristine copy of 7.10 Gutsy 486 to start with and lets me copy any and all desired files over at my leisure. Gutsy will also let you do an automatic documents and settings transfer from your old drive during the install. While you're getting your new instl'n tuned to your liking, you can always boot back into your old drive to check for anything you may have missed, etc. And in your case if you did decide later to use that drive or a new partition in it to store your /home and/or your /var or /etc directories, you'd have the drive to do it with. Drives are pretty cheap these days. An extra one in the box makes things easier. It also gives you a physically separate drive from your system drive for backups. So if your main drive fries, a copy of your data is always safe. Should you decide to keep your /home directory on the other drive, you could always use a separate partition on the system drive for your backups, although ideally you should decide on this before setting up the partitions on your new drive. Hope something here helps. Cheers.

At present I have a 500g drive with win2000 on sda1 and Feisty on sda3 in a dual boot managed by grub along with sda2, a 150g ntfs data partition which I intend to drastically shrink, sda4, an extended partition, and sda5, the swap partition. I also have a second unformatted 500g HD.
I would like feedback on the feasibility of the following upgrade strategy. I would like to do a fresh install of Gutsy on a partition on the second (now empty) drive, and then copy over to this installation all files I will need from the Feisty install including programs I installed, config info, especially Thunderbird and Firefox config, Thunderbird mailboxes, and anything else you might mention that I have forgotten.
If this is all feasible then the next upgrade would involve formatting sda3, the Feisty partition, and installing the version after Gutsy in it. Assuming this will somehow work, I would welcome feedback on following points:
1. How best to achieve copying over the files outlined in second paragraph, ie which files do I need and where are they, etc.
2. Will grub automatically transparently cope with all this, updating the boot info on the MBR on sda1.