Updating Ubuntu to take advantage of new hardware.
 

The general question, in cases where I upgrade hardware what is the easiest way to make sure Ubuntu is configured to take best advantage of hardware changes.

Recently my seven year old put a crack in the lower right hand corner of his laptop screen.

I got a parts laptop from EBay that matched his, except it has a Radion graphics accelerator instead of the Dell D610 default. I swapped in his hard drive, battery, and memory. Everything workes great, he sees less lag when he plays Minecraft, so far so good.

Some games that I had tried to setup for him hadn't worked because of the version of OpenGL. My assumption is that Ubuntu picked the highest version of OpenGL that the vidio hardware would support.

What is the easiest and most generic way to get Ubuntu 12.04 to reevaluate the hardware and get the configuration up to optimum.

The one option I can think of is installing Ubuntu again over the current installation. I seem to remember that the CD had that option.

Anyone have any ideas on this subject?

I would go with apget, or through the GUI.

Do you have the newest version of umbuntu?
If you don't and you're rebuilding your son's PC, and there's no critical data, hey reinstall with the newest version of umbuntu.

You're right. I guess I'll archive his home folder and re-install. I was hoping for a method that preserved his application installs. I had thought there was a install option like that. I checked the options on the LiveCD, no such luck.

Moderator Response
 

Moved: This thread is more suitable in <Ubuntu> and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

There is a new version of Ubuntu coming out next month; the Beta came out 2 days ago, if you are feeling brave:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ub...ch/001024.html

Of course, since Ubuntu is "open source," you can upgrade/install components such as OpenGL independently, if you wish.

If you reinstall, do so on 2 partitions using the "other" option in the installer. Use a / (root) and a /home partition. This will save you some trouble down the road.

Don't know how big the hdd is but you could easily try an install of a newer version on 10 or 15gigs of space to see how it runs before doing a full install with 2 partitions and some room to breath.

You can put an awful lot on 15gigs. Dual booting is easy. Grub will pick up your current install easily and boot to either just fine.

You may be in luck after all. See this post from the Ubuntu forums:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php...75&postcount=5
You can use the dpkg --get-selections and sudo dpkg --set-selections commands as listed there to reinstall all of your packages from the Ubuntu repos after a clean install of Ubuntu.
Note that this will not reinstall any packages that you installed from PPA repos or from other sources.
Hope this helps.