Les Mikesell wrote: >William Case wrote: >>> I second or third this suggestion. It is tiring every 6 months to have >>> to start from scratch so to speak. >>> >> >> On the other hand -- there are people like me who like to play around >> with Fedora; adding new programs that hardly get used; trying out >> different configurations; experimenting and learning. Doing a new >> version install lets me get rid of all the cruff and start over every so often. >> > > So what happens after you've learned something and are ready to do > some real work with your system - and then next time that cruft is > something worth saving? That is the problem I face. I keep some things on my machine that I don't want to have to recreate each time. Some of it is user data, and can be housed in /home on a separate partition which I can maintain from "upgrade" to "upgrade" (reinstall, more accurately). But in the /home directories we also keep various individual configuration files (desktop, etc) for things which may and sometimes do change from version to version. I also install a number of additional applications (many games, for example) and it can take an hour or more to go through the entire repository lists to find each of them. Add to that configurations for such things as sendmail, apache, etc, and I can spend almost as much time getting the machine *back* to where I was as it takes between releases. This is why, for the most part, I try to *upgrade* rather than *reinstall*. But this, as we know, causes other problems. My current desktop at home, for example, no longer produces sound. The hardware is just fine (checked with LiveCDs), the config files all *look* fine, but still no sound. The machines on which I installed from scratch all produce sound. So my home mail/web server is moving to CentOS. I can't stick with Fedora, as it moves too fast and I'm losing legacy support. Not sure what I'm going to do with my desktops; I'll see where Fedora 7 takes me and make my decision there. But with the continual recommendation that I reinstall instead of upgrade, I'm beginning to feel like I'm part of an external QA lab rather than a somewhat technically-minded home user trying to get some things done. For what it's worth, -Don Levey
