Not my experience
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| montezuma May 05, 2010 9:08 PM EDT |
This author claims that a clean install rather than an upgrade will stop heartburn. I call bs. Most upgrade problems I have had are nothing to do with overwriting of old system files but are simply bugs in the software in the newest version. A clean install wouldn't help at all. Generally the first two weeks after an upgrade are frustrating as one sorts through these annoyances. After that it is smooth sailing until the next upgrade many months later. |
| dinotrac May 05, 2010 9:32 PM EDT |
Ditto on that. I've almost never done a clean install to an existing system. Like monty, my problems have tended to be software bugs that were eased up in the next update or so. |
| GaryBaxter May 05, 2010 10:37 PM EDT |
But isn't it funny how many people have "solved" their upgrade problems by clean installing? I spend countless hours in the forums helping people, and have seen this a lot. That's fine if it works for you, and I did say that some people will report that it works fine. But, countless times I have seen fresh installs cure their ills. Besides, I can surf while the OS is installing. I can surf and continue setting things up while my apps are downloading. Down time is minimal while installing. I'd like to see you do anything while the upgrade process is going on. Also, how long does a fresh install take vs. upgrading? Takes me 4 minutes from flash drive to do the base install, and if I take my time and make lunch, another hour and a half. Upgrade if you want, but you'll never convince me it is inherently better. Or faster for that matter. (unless you're on dial-up) Have a nice day people. |
| tracyanne May 05, 2010 11:23 PM EDT |
I've done several upgrades now, and convinced several people that they are quite capable of the same (do they ever get excited when they discover how smart they are), all with no problems at all. The Ubuntu upgrade process is actually excellent. |
| gus3 May 05, 2010 11:33 PM EDT |
My experience says it's a crap shoot, no matter which route one takes. In computers, as well as in life. |
| GaryBaxter May 06, 2010 12:09 AM EDT |
@tracyanne- I have done well over 70 installs of linux on various hardware with much success. Other people have tried it on 3 computers and had total failure. It's amazing how that works. But if upgrading works for you, go for it. But I doubt you'll hear any pc techs say that upgrading is better. Sure, it may work, but it is not inherently better. How can overwriting existing files be better than starting from scratch? The OS has to follow a path during upgrade that is not there during a fresh install. That is 1 more step, and one more chance for something to go wrong. |
| Steven_Rosenber May 06, 2010 12:15 AM EDT |
Maybe it's my bad luck, but I haven't done a successful upgrade in some time. Debian Lenny to Squeeze, OpenBSD 4.4 to 4.5, FreeBSD 7.3 ports/packages upgrade - they all went south. I had slight trouble with Ubuntu 8.04-8.10-9.04 (done in 1 day) ... I'm almost ready to roll a clean Debian Lenny or Squeeze install. |
| tuxchick May 06, 2010 12:34 AM EDT |
I don't do clean installs for upgrades, for me they're a waste of time. Debian dist-upgrades reliably, and Ubuntu seems to be getting better at it. Though I am not amused that upgrading from 9.04 to 9.10 pulled in a bunch of Mono junk, F-Spot, Tomboy, and so on-- I had zero Mono packages or libs in 9.04, so that is deliberately forcing it on users when we have already decided we don't want it. My oldest dist-upgraded Debian machine is several years old, 6 or 7 I think. Just waiting for the hardware failure than will end its run! Linux doesn't get worse with age like Windows, it gets better as bugs get fixed and we tweak it to suit our needs. There are some neat hacks for preserving your package selection, which speeds up restoring a clean install to the state you want it in. But it's still a lot of fiddling getting everything back the way you want it. |
| tracyanne May 06, 2010 12:43 AM EDT |
@Gary, never said it was better. Just said I do it with Ubuntu on all my computers now, and I've managed to get a lot of other very non geek people to do it as well, on a wide range of hardware. Just said it was excellent. Installing from scratch, or even as an upgrade, works just as well for me, but i always partition my HDD, which makes installing from scratch as an upgrade tool trivial. If you have a machine that you've used Ubuntu's single partition install on, you MUST upgrade, or do the backup and restore of personal files dance. Upgrading (using the cdupgrade tool) from CD or ISO image also works exceptionally well with Ubuntu, at least on the machine I've tried it on. |
| vainrveenr May 06, 2010 12:54 AM EDT |
Quoting:But isn't it funny how many people have "solved" their upgrade problems by clean installing? OTOH, those having "upgrade problems" may also achieve better, more stable performance from point-release upgrades rather than full wiping-out, clean-slate installations. This is easily applicable to those who hastily adopt "point-oh/point-zero" distro releases of almost any software including a Linux distro. One method of clarifying the suitability of "point-oh/point-zero" releases is brought from the Perl CPAN sourcecode upgrade-scheme page: Quoting:Since the release 5.6 (March 2000) Perl has followed the commonly used scheme where there is a development branch, which eventually stabilizes into a "point-oh/point-zero" (.0) release, which then branches into a maintenance branch with maintenance releases (.1, .2, ...), while the development branches back to uncharted waters. The development (or devel, as it is called by the Perl 5 developers) releases have an odd (as opposed to even) major release number (5.7, 5.9, 5.11, 5.13, ...), while the maintenance (or maint) releases have an even major release number (5.6, 5.8, 5.10, 5.12, 5.14, ...). The release candidates leading up to "point-zero" releases are called testing releases.(from http://www.cpan.org/src/README.html ) So for Perl as for other software, one can either hastily adopt a .0 version of this software and then continually upgrade to increasingly stable major maintenance releases (.2 , .4, .6 ...etc), or else start an install from a clean slate using a maintenance release. As others note in previous comments, Debian GNU/Linux itself also makes it fairly easy to accomplish a point-release upgrade from a major stable version.... e.g., upgrading from Stable "Lenny" 5.0.3 to 5.0.4. For those such as the Linux Curmudgeon tech writer who might more strongly than others insist upon "starting from scratch with clean installs", there IS a completely sensible and relevant opinion that clean installs especially SHOULD be carried out with new, never-before-tried distros, i.e., using "distro-hopping". One piece suggesting as much is Brockmeier's 'In Defense of Distro-hopping', found at http://ostatic.com/blog/in-defense-of-distro-hopping . One quite-applicable excerpt of this is here: Quoting:Looking through the lens of an IT professional, whether that's a system administrator, tech writer, developer, or working in IT marketing, it's a really good idea to have an accurate view of the landscape. And you don't get that by jockeying only one distro all day every day. What I've seen happen to all too many users is a sort of Linux myopia, where the realm of what's possible is scoped to only one distro, and the understanding of what's available is dialed down to what's available in the user's chosen distro.Brockmeier's piece here might be well-worth reviewing, and even by the Linux Curmudgeon tech writer who so avidly suggests that upgrading [any one particular distro of choice] should "come with a warning". |
| mortenalver May 06, 2010 3:38 AM EDT |
The last time I tried a dist-upgrade in Debian (to the current stable version, I think), it failed miserably and the computer basically stopped working until I'd reinstalled it. I have a current Mandriva PC that I've upgraded. It works, sort of. I don't know if the various bugs I see are due to upgrading or due to Mandriva (or KDE 4). |
| r_a_trip May 06, 2010 5:03 AM EDT |
Upgrading might be a viable option, but for me it has been like rolling the dice. Sometimes it works wonderfully, sometimes it is a tortured ordeal resulting in a near unusable system. I don't blame it on the Distro. It's me. I'm just crazy enough not to stick to what is available in the distro repositories, if I want newer or something that isn't available. In the process of "augmenting" the system, I undoubtedly do more damage then good from time to time. That an upgrade routine chokes on my Frankensteinian setup is understandable. That's why I've opted to just do a clean install with a new major version. I partition my drives accordingly and I'm up and running the same day I wiped it. I do do lose some settings, but they can be easily changed. On the other hand, I've started to rely on the default settings of a distro much more than before. If my half yearly wipe-and-reinstall ritual is to be as painless as possible, I need sane defaults. Must be why relatively minor experiments from any given Distro has the potential to send my mood far south. |
| GaryBaxter May 06, 2010 5:03 AM EDT |
vainrveenr: What the hell does that have to do with the price of rice in china? You start off on-topic, then take over with your nonsense. |
| dinotrac May 06, 2010 9:02 AM EDT |
Gary - Only 70 installs? Don't worry sonny, you'll catch up with the rest of us some day! I strongly suspect that choice of distro plays into this, as installation/upgrade is one of the things that is not standardized across distros. As to which is easier/faster -- That depends on how you spend your time. For me, the key is single-threaded time. If I have to sit there for the whole process, I darned well want it to be fast. If I can start and go off to do other things, cool. The first step of the whole process, btw -- install or upgrade -- is to get the softtware, not the insertion of your nifty little USB stick. Whether you download an ISO image, or bring it down as the first step in an upgrade, that's likely to take more time than any subsequent steps. |
| Koriel May 06, 2010 10:50 AM EDT |
I would also say the choice is very distro related, for example Slackware upgrades very nicely I rarely have any problems with that but with PCLinuxOS i always do a partial clean install, ie leave the /home partition alone but format / partition this saves a lot of time plus i make a copy of the /etc folder prior to my format.
Once Ive reinstalled and added in any extra packages i do a very selective restore of /etc. Im afraid with desktop based distros ive been burned to many times to trust their upgrade abilities. |
| jhansonxi May 06, 2010 10:54 PM EDT |
I normally do new installs only. I have a netboot TFTP server on my network which makes it rather easy. Most of my upgrade problems are due to workarounds for bugs in the previous release, especially hardware compatibility problems. |
| tuxchick May 06, 2010 11:22 PM EDT |
But my way is still the right way. Haha I run away fast. |
| jdixon May 07, 2010 9:56 AM EDT |
> I would also say the choice is very distro related, Agreed. |
| tuxchick May 08, 2010 7:42 PM EDT |
Oh GRRR on StupidBuntu. Not only did the dist-upgrade to Lucid Lynx dump a big wad of Mono stuff on my formerly 100% Mono-free system, it removed Digikam, my favorite and most-used app on this machine! This means war. |
| montezuma May 08, 2010 9:19 PM EDT |
sudo apt-get purge libmono* libgdiplus cli-common libglitz-glx1 libglitz1
sudo apt-get install digikam /dick |
| tracyanne May 09, 2010 1:00 AM EDT |
Quoting:sudo apt-get purge libmono* libgdiplus cli-common libglitz-glx1 libglitz1 will get rid of F-Spot completely, which is great. I simply reinstalled Mono after removing the Mono applications I don't use. Now I can better track the Developers. Quoting:sudo apt-get install digikam I'd recommend Shotwell, it integrates into Ubuntu so much better. It's a really nice application, and for those suffering from nomonomania, it's a C++ application. |
| tuxchick May 09, 2010 2:07 AM EDT |
A dist-upgrade is not supposed to install a bunch of new apps, but only upgrade what is already on the system. Making a raft of Mono crud a dependency for a dist-upgrade and yanking Digikam is lame. Maybe a bug, sure just a "mistake". Shotwell is not comparable to Digikam. It is nice, but much less capable. Digikam is chock-full of professional-level features, and is well-supported. One of the best dev teams on any project. |
| tracyanne May 09, 2010 3:08 AM EDT |
I actually had to reinstall, rather than upgrade, as I had assigned 14Gig to Root, and had managed due to the several IDEs (Lazarus, GAMBAS and MonoDevelop, and their associated Runtime Framworks), and the fact that I had installed the complete UbuntuStudio suite of Applications, I was using 11.5 Gig, after clearing the caches, and Upgrade needed more space than I had available on my root partition. The reinstall went well, although I had a few problems after install as I was unable to access my Passwords, which I keep in KWallet. For some still unknown reason Kwalletmanager simply failed to load a GUI, and when I finally managed to get it to kWalletManager deleted the password file (lucky I keep a backup). |
| Steven_Rosenber May 10, 2010 4:30 PM EDT |
tracyanne, I'll look at Shotwell. DigiKam does more than gthumb, but the KDE photo-manager is just so darn awkward (not that F-Spot is less so, but the Mono-driven photo-manager is a trainwreck in so many aspects...) Sharpen has many tweakable options in digiKam, yet I can't seem to get the settings right. |
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