[PLUG] Preparing for a distro change

[Richard C. Steffens]

Tim Bruce wrote:
> Using the command
>     rpm -qa
>
> under SuSE Linux should list all your INSTALLED packages.  That will give
> you an idea of what software you need to reinstall (other than new
> dependencies).
>   
Yes, it gave me quite a list. I pointed the output of the command to a
text file. There are 910 lines in that file. While I haven't gone over
every line, I do recognize some of the file names. I suspect that's not
the productive way to approach the problem, but I'm glad to know it exists.
> If /home is installed on another partition, you don't have to worry about
> that being impacted by the new install.  However, you should back it up. 
> A new Linux version may expect certain config files (or new parameters) in
> your personal directory and may not work correctly.  If you're staying
> with SuSE, there's been some discussion about that with the new version of
> KDE, but I haven't followed all the conversations.
>   
As I mentioned in my reply to Rich, /home is not in a separate
partition, but rsteff is, and is the only place anything exists in
/home, so I've pretty much got that covered. But, as you mention, there
will be some things done to /home/rsteff during the installation to
configure some of the programs. So I definitely will have a copy of
rsteff kept in a different location just in case.
> I'd also backup /etc and tuck that away into a new location to ensure you
> don't overwrite anything important there (after tweaking your system).
>   
Good point. I know I've tweaked fstab. There are probably others that I
don't recall -- things that I had to do early on, but work fine and
don't need attention after that.
> Best of luck.
>   
Thanks.

-- 
Regards,

Dick Steffens