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Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Upgrade or Fresh Install?

People have been asking me whether or not they should upgrade their Feisty installs or do a completely new install for Gutsy. My answer is that you should install Gutsy fresh. There are 3 main reasons for doing this:

1. You don't have to worry about 3rd Party Repositories. If you have Wine, Skype, Opera, Mediabuntu or any other 3rd party repo installed you have to make sure they are ready for Gutsy and get updated as well. Some 3rd party repos might not be as easy to update as others.

2. If you have any Compiz-Fusion running on your Feisty install you'll have to completely uninstall it, remove the 3rd party repo you installed it from and reinstall Ubuntu-desktop and the Feisty version of Compiz. There is no way around this. If you don't do all these steps right, you are going to run into a lot of problems with Compiz-Fusion in Gutsy. All Compiz-Fusion guides for Feisty where hacky (including mine) and have potential to cause these conflicting install & dependency problems.

3. I LOVE Ubuntu, but updating it from one version to another sucks and doesn't work. I'm sure people will argue this with me, but they're full of it. Upgrading is a real pain and posses too many problems and complications to ever be a realistic choice. If you want things to work like there supposed to install it fresh. Gutsy is totally worth the work. If one thing is broken during the update you run the risk of losing your ability to actually use Ubuntu. While in Linux everything is fixable, but if you aren't comfortable with the command line you run the risk of completely hosing your system and not being able to get your data back.


Tips for Installing Gutsy
1. Have your Home folder on a different partition.
2. Back up your Home folder.
3. Back up your Home folder. (Not a typo, its so important it needs to be said twice)
edited by pHreaksYcle

20 comments:

Unknown said...

Right. I've upgraded from dev version and Firefox is behaving so buggy, and almost no one has reported this, so I think it's a problem on that. Also flash and java applets not working!

ekonomikz said...

Perhaps this is an aside, but I was running gutsy beta through the release candidate, and today I did a clean install of the AMD64 bit version. It is much faster, and more responsive. Even vmware player 2 runs better!

redDEAD said...

sure chris, want to buy some magic beans?

Anonymous said...

Fresh install always, that goes with any operating system in my opinion.

But especially ubuntu, always fresh install, you cant go wrong.

ekonomikz said...

if the bean stock grows.

Geoff said...

No argument here. I kept /home untouched on a separate partition, and this has to be the smoothest installation I can remember. I was bitten upgrading from Dapper to Edgy, I won't go there again. Sure, a few things have to be reinstalled, but the desktop, settings and data are all preserved. And it's nice to have wireless working without having to use ndiswrapper :)

chancho said...

this "fresh install" attitude is from the windows world.

updated from 6.06 to 6.10 to 7.04 to 7.10. everything worked excellent. i would hate to invest hours of work & downloads to have my comp again like it was before.


so update, you can't go wrong

Cory said...

If I make my home folder a FAT32 partition, will it work? Or does it have to be something like ext3?

I'm asking because I'm dual booting windows and linux, and I would like to be able to swap files between OS without having to use other software in windows.

redDEAD said...

it will work, but fat32 wont store files larger than 4gigs.

pluc said...

I, for one, upgraded from Feisty to Gutsy a few days before the official release using upgrade-manager -d and it worked flawlessly. The only thing (and i really do mean the only thing) that doesn't work, is that when i close my laptop lid, the screen doesn't automatically lock. Anyone knows where to set that?

Aside from that, I may be "full of it" according to reddead, but i assure you it worked fine for me. MSN on Pidgin was dead, due to missing libs that were out of the repos, but that's because i had manually compiled it. Removing my "custom" version and installing it from the official repos worked right out of the box.

Alex said...

you should run an article about installing home on separate partitions...

josephcherng said...

Everything works great but is it just me or does the wireless run really slow...24 Mb/s slow. Anyone experiencing this? Haven't found a solution yet.

Also,the non-stop Fan issue that was brought up before seems to now occur in both Gutsy and Vista. I suppose this has something to do with the 1501's scaling...not sure though.

redDEAD said...

c0ld,

YOU'RE FULL OF SHIT, what you did most people can't do. You dodged a bullet congrats, don't send Ubuntu n00bs to their death because you want to prove me wrong.

Upgrading is risky and if you get lucky, congrats. I prefer to install Gutsy once and only once and not have to worry about fixing things.

chancho said...

did you forget to take your medics or why do you insult c0ld?

redDEAD said...

It was a complement, what c0ld can do most of my readers can't do. Most people that come to this site are Ubuntu n00bs, they need different advice than more seasoned Ubuntu veterans.

Plus chanco YOUR FULL OF SHIT TOO, "update you can't go wrong"? dude updating is a risk I'm not willing to take. It's not a Windows mentality, it a common sense mentality. I don't want to be chasing fixes. Maybe updating a distro will work better in the future but now it just isn't there.

chancho said...

what a nice boy you are.

budikov said...

Hello!

My name is Dmitriy. I live in Ukraine, country in Eastern Europe. I have laptop Inspiron 1501 too. I usually use WinXP. But on last week installed Ubuntu 7.10 on my dell. And I can not connect to internet.
Please, tell me how to find modem in Ubuntu in properties of dial-up connection.

redDEAD said...

budikov

when dell releases the driver it will work. check www.dell.com for the newer driver.

diegoeche said...

I should read this before making my upgrade :(

dov said...

budikov,

There is a new version of the conexant hsf modem driver available from www.linuxant.com
which seems to work on 7.10. Follow the instructions for installation carefully. Dell does not seem to be offering it yet, but should within a few weeks.