[SWLUG] Changing to a new distro

[Andrew Price]

On 19/03/07 11:23, Neil Jones wrote:
> I am currently using suse 9. I have my disk partitioned so that /home is
> on a separate partition.
> 
> I am looking to upgrade to another distro. I was possibly thinking of
> Fedora 5. 

If you're going to Fedora, I'd suggest 6 or the upcoming 7. Fedora 5's
support period is almost over. If you're not a big fan of regular distro
upgrades and want a long term support distro you might want to consider
something like CentOS, Ubuntu 6.06LTS or Debian. I'm an Ubuntu 6.10 user
meself.

> I have 3 hard disks. One legacy  win98 that I hardly use and 1 linux.
> The third is a linux for back up.
> 
> Does anyone have any advice they can give me about the following.
> How do I, if possible, avoid overwriting the /home partition when I
> upgrade? Will this cause problems?

The installer should ask you how to partition your drive. If you choose
to arrange your partitions manually and then choose your /home partition
as /home and _tell it not to format it_ then it should keep your /home
partition untouched. Then you'd just need to worry about the
profile/config files in your home directories not being compatible with
the software in the new distro.

> Should I just copy everything onto the 3rd disk, unplug it, and do the
> upgrade and then copy my files back?

Personally I'd back up my files before upgrading anyway, to avoid Sod's
Law etc.

Good luck with the upgrade

--
Andy Price | http://andrewprice.me.uk