Sean’s Blog

Last weekend, I reinstalled my Ubuntu desktop. It had been running well for almost a year, but I had made so many changes that i though it was time to clear out some of the cruft. i used to religiously reinstall Windows every 6 months for the same reason.

Now I know that most of the problems I was having (wireless was flaky, several services started to fail unexpectedly) were fixable with some work, which is one of the great things about Linux. But sometimes giving it a clean wipe can make life alot easier. While doing this, I put together some tips for reinstalling Linux. This is not another hand holding Linux install walk through, but pointers for those who have the basics down.

• If you are installing off the Ubuntu CD, make sure you run the verify integrity option before you begin the installation. I’ve had a bad download cause the install CD to bottom out in the middle of an install. The ten minutes it takes can save you hours of headache trying to pull down a new image, burn another CD and install again (assuming you have a working computer that you can access).
• Write down your network information before you begin the install. Nothing stinks worse then getting the computer all setup, then realizing you have no idea what your network key is and needing to reboot your router to factory defaults.
• Backup your home directory (and other tings you want to save) onto removable media. The easiest way I’ve found to do this is just to tar the files up onto a removable hard drive using the command “tar czvf /media/flashdrive/sean.tar.gz /home/sean” where /media/flashdrive is the removable drive and /home/sean is the directory you are backing up.
• Before you back things up, clear out some of the temp files that have built up. $HOME/.thumbnails, $HOME/.sessions, $HOME/.mozilla (in Gnome) usually can go.
• Watch out for Wine. Wine by default installs in $HOME/.wine and can be quite big. If you don’t need wine and are just going to reinstall it, you can delete that directory too. Otherwise save it with your backup, just be aware of the size of it.
• Once you have network connectivity , update your system. It may take awhile, but it will make your system more stable and safer.
• Download and run Automatix. Automatix does some of the heavy lifting of commonly installed packages.

Hopefully that helps. Of course I take no responsibility if you delete something you need, mess up your system, or cause any other general computing havoc.