Re: Adding a new boot disk while keeping old disk
On 11/26/24 01:03, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
> But there are no icons left on the desktop - no more Portal, and none of
> the utilities I downloaded were on my $PATH.
>
> How do the rest of you deal with all the user-added stuff that vanishes
> when you do a fresh install? Are there some tricks I can use, rather
> than painstakingly re-installing all my utilities one by one?
If they were installed through a package manager, you probably shouldn't do
that.
> I assume you can just copy the old /home over to the new drive
Mind the dotfiles. Apps might behave strangely when you run them with an
old config file.
> But that does nothing about all the nifty utilities that
> were in (e.g.) /usr/bin (even though the configuration files are probably
> in /home).
I hate losing stuff and drastic changes like that, so what I've done in
the past when I used Ubuntu was:
* do a complete backup
* clean-install the latest *-LTS version
* restore /home, being careful not to overwrite existing dotfiles
* restore any other filesystems that aren't part of the base install
* modify /etc/profile.d/* to change $PATH as appropriate
* keep the installation as long as possible.
The last time I went through this I made a list of installed packages (apt
list --installed) so I could re-install (some of) them on the new OS.
This probably is not the recommended procedure. Since I switched to Debian
the issue hasn't come up, so I haven't yet been forced into a decision as to
how to deal with it.
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