Uncategorized @ 11 Jun 2009 03:15 pm by bigfish
One of the best ways to learn about an operating system is to break it, and I’ve gotten very good at breaking operating systems over the years.
After a bunch of random tweaks to Ubuntu, I succeeded in breaking it, too. Well, not as badly as I’ve broken Windows. For example — everything was running, just really slowly. (Really slowly was the Windows-like behavior.) And I’d sometimes get weird errors that I couldn’t trace.
The best thing to have done prior to this problem would have been to place /Home in a separate partition, which I’ll be doing soon enough. Had /Home been in its own partition I could have just wiped out the OS, reinstalled, then pointed it to /Home. Anyway, everything was (and still is) in one place so I didn’t want to play that game.
The fix was easy. I used Simple Backup to backup everything in the /Home directory then simply wiped out Ubuntu (using a Live CD), repartitioned the drives (to give Vista even less space), and reinstalled.
Unlike the nightmare that can attend this sort of thing under Windows, I had a working installation in about an hour. After choosing a few programs from the Add/Remove menu, everything was pretty much there. Selective restores from the Simple Backup backups have worked without a hitch.
Ubuntu is running beautifully, all of my files are where I want them, I have no DLLs to worry about, and it’s smooth sailing. And it looks as good as ever, too.
Having my /home directory in a separate partition has saved me from many nightmares when reinstalling or even when switching distros. It should be the default installation method for everyone when installing their Linux system.
Makes sense to me. I’m making the move now.
[...] More reasons to love Linux Ubuntu is running beautifully, all of my files are where I want them, I have no DLLs to worry about, and it’s smooth sailing. And it looks as good as ever, too. [...]
[...] More reasons to love Linux [...]