If you keep your /home on seperate partition

[DarkThinker]

There is nothing more convenient for me than a distro upgrade, everything remains the same configuration wise, and I get a fresh binaries. That's great, but is that what really is happening?

I usually keep all the .* files and folders as they were. Do you do the same? Or do you remove specific configuration files from it so that fresh / more suitable ones are created by the desktop environment/specific applications? Especially when the distro upgrade entails a newer version of your desktop environment GNOME/KDE

I always thought about this, especially with .gnome* stuff, but I never had an issue, or at least one that I have been aware of.

 

[Robor]

My last 2 upgrade attempts (Feisty > Gutsy) didn't go so well but when I went from Edgy to Feisty previously I left everything in /home totally intact.

 

[silverpig]

I have a separate /home and leave all the files as they are. I usually have some minor glitch I have to fix, but it's nothing that an hour of fiddling around doesn't fix.

 

[MrColin]

I've been overwriting my / pretty frequently lately since I've been trying to compile an app that wants to hose various critical libraries. If you use automatix in ubuntu, I reccomend deleting ".automatix" if you want to run it agian since it can break your apt database in some circumstances when run agianst an old config file.

 

[Nothinman]

My /home is separate but I never reinstall the system so it doesn't really matter, I run sid so I just keep upgrading as the DDs upload new packages.

 

[DarkThinker]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
My /home is separate but I never reinstall the system so it doesn't really matter, I run sid so I just keep upgrading as the DDs upload new packages.

Erm...but you are still getting new versions of GNOME / KDE and other binaries no? That's the same situation, no?

It seems to me that it is a non-issue so far, but I think when I make my move from Fedora 7 x86 to Fedora 8 x86-64 I will move my .files to a separate folder before installation just for the sake of breaking a habit, I think it's the way to go from a religious point of view

 

[Nothinman]

Erm...but you are still getting new versions of GNOME / KDE and other binaries no? That's the same situation, no?

Of course, that's the point of running sid. I get to upgrade on a steady basis instead of huge bursts every ~6 months. And no, I haven't found a reason to wipe out my .gnome* directories or anything yet.

 

[DarkThinker]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Erm...but you are still getting new versions of GNOME / KDE and other binaries no? That's the same situation, no?

Of course, that's the point of running sid. I get to upgrade on a steady basis instead of huge bursts every ~6 months. And no, I haven't found a reason to wipe out my .gnome* directories or anything yet.

Wow, sorry Nothinman, should have expected this response from a Debian sid fundamentalist

 

[imported_LoKe]

I've had /home on its own partition since Dapper, and since I've dist-upgraded, re-installed, dist-upgraded some more, another re-install, and a final dist-upgrade to Feisty. Never had a problem.

 

[silverpig]

Originally posted by: LoKe
I've had /home on its own partition since Dapper, and since I've dist-upgraded, re-installed, dist-upgraded some more, another re-install, and a final dist-upgrade to Feisty. Never had a problem.

Something to watch out for when going to gutsy: evms messes around with partitions like this and makes some of them unmountable.

It hit me twice... workstation and laptop, although the mythbox was unscathed.

My systems are basically:

/dev/sda1 /
/dev/sda2 swap
/dev/sda3 /home

Upon upgrading to gutsy I got a bunch of errors during boot of "device-mapper" yada yada yada. Upon reaching the desktop I find that /dev/sda3 isn't mounted, and I have a new /home directory with the default gutsy stuff in it.

cd /
rm -rf home
mkdir home
mount /dev/sda3

Error: /dev/sda3 or /home busy

No matter what I can't mount the partition.

The solution is

sudo apt-get remove evms
reboot


Just in case you get hit when/if you upgrade to gutsy.