[PLUG] Clean OS install instead of upgrade

[John Jason Jordan]

On Thu, 04 Nov 2010 23:28:02 -0700
Russell Senior <seniorr at aracnet.com> dijo:

>>>>>> "Matt" == Matt McKenzie <lnxknight at gmail.com> writes:
>
>Matt> IMHO, you get this response because it is the preferred method,
>Matt> especially if you are more than 2 versions distant from current.
>Matt> Doing an upgrade from N-2 or earlier almost invariably leads
>Matt> to... headaches ;) (N being current) Same thing with upgrading
>Matt> more than one step at a time.

It's not the preferred method if you have so many apps installed that
it takes you a week to get them all reinstalled. I am serious.

>I am normally a Debian/unstable guy and to me "releases" are an alien
>concept.  However, recently I have deployed a few Ubuntu boxes for
>family members for "usability" reasons.  And, actually, also on a few
>laptops I have floating around.  A couple of them had fallen a few
>releases behind and their users recently got ominous warnings that
>support of 9.04 was going away.
>
>So, I cautiously did the recommended thing, which was "update-manager
>-d", and ... it worked fine.  I had to re-do it three times (9.04 ->
>9.10 -> 10.04 -> 10.10) to get up to date, but it all went fine.  Not
>so much as a hiccup.  Maybe it's a .deb thing that it goes so
>smoothly, I don't know.  Only that I'd heard the "oh, do a fresh
>install" advice, I ignored it, and I seem to have lived to tell the
>tale.

In my experience there are sometimes issues with an upgrade, but so far
it has always been less work than a fresh install. In my current
situation it has taken about six hours to fix problems with the upgrade
from Fedora 11 to Fedora 13. Compare that with days to reinstall apps
after a fresh install.

It appears that the "fresh install" advocates never have a clue how
complex my installation is. 

As for software to get a list of installed apps, I have done that. I
had someone on the Fedora forums give me excellent commands to generate
lists. Unfortunately, any command you use will generate a list of all
RPMs. More than three quarters of them are libraries and dependencies.
The resulting list was just about unreadable. It would be awesome if the
Gnome menu editor had an export function, but it does not. Copying down
the 100+ apps by hand took only a little over ten minutes and gave me a
list that is actually usable. I realize it is not the geek way, but
it's my way.

My upgrade from Fedora 11 to 13 is now complete except:

* Can't get VirtualBox to launch. Missing module error messages.
* Praat won't launch. It appears for a second, then disappears. 
* I have four python packages that won't update because they are all
incompatible with each other.

Google and e-lists will come up with the solutions. And I'll expand my
knowledge in the process.