I've found that by keeping my home directory in a separate partition I retain most of my settings, if not all. I also keep a list of what everything I have installed. So far it's working better to do the reinstall. I reformat my root and boot partitions. Rich On Tue January 20 2004 10:45 am, Paul W. Abrahams wrote:
On Tuesday 20 January 2004 2:30 am, Hylton Conacher (ZR1HPC) wrote:
I have seen repeatedly on this list the errors reported by people who try and upgrade to a new version as opposed to installing from scratch. A friend of mine tried the same idea to upgrade from 8.1 to 9.0 and it took her about a week to realise I was right and that she should have done a clean install of the new version as opposed to trying to upgrade from an older version. DO NOT try and update to a newer version, rather do a clean install of the new version.
My advice is therefore to leave your existing partitions as they are and do a clean install of the new version. During the install you will have opportunity to format the partitions.
Safer, yes. But it means losing all your customizations and possibly a lot of data. I suppose it's possible to keep the non-dot files from your previous home directory, but even retaining your old email can be difficult (depending on the mailer, I suppose). And if you have any licensed software around, porting that across the reinstallation is particularly vexing.
My experience is that upgrading by one or two versions can be gotten to work, though sometimes with headaches, but upgrading by more than that (say from 7.x to 9.0) probably won't work.
Paul Abrahams
-- Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter. -Martin Luther King- C. Richard Matson