[plug] Sundry niggles with Hardy

[Daniel J. Axtens]

> Does anybody else recommend a clean install over an upgrade?

Maybe.

If your machine crashes/power drops out/etc part way through an
upgrade, you can occasionally be left with an unbootable system. And,
as it's easy to upgrade with aptitude/apt-get without first backing up
all important data, if things go pear shaped, you'll likely be
spending a fair deal of time with live cds/rescue mode trying to
resurrect your system. Speaking from experience, this is not fun[1].
In theory, you should be able to pick up the upgrade from where you
left off, but that's not always the way it works.

However, if you're doing a clean install, if the computer randomly
crashes the first time, or power drops out or whatever, you can try
the install again with no great loss. You also get the benefit of
removing any cruft from the old version. OTOH, you may need to spend
more time setting up your system if you've got things installed that
are outside the main repository - e.g. codecs, dev tools, server
software, software that doesn't come in Ubuntu packages, etc.

I guess the moral is that whatever you do, back up your data first.
Easier said than done.

Daniel
who reallly should be studying for TEE but isn't.

[1] Well, I lie. It is fun when you succeed, and you learn *lots* in
the process. But I was fortunate in that the box I was working on was
simply a web cache serving my family (running Squid-2.7 w/
store-rewrite, hi Adrian!), and had it been unrecoverable, all I would
have lost would have basically been the cached data/config files.
YMMV.