Ubuntu Upgrade - The Plan

Well once again it's time to upgrade my Ubuntu install. OK, so I'm a bit late to be upgrading from Karmic to Lucid, but I've been busy!

Clearly I don't want to lose all that I've built up over the past year or so on this machine, but I have decided that I want to do a clean install. There are a number of reasons for this, the main one is that I haven't done so yet on this machine, and this Lucid is an LTS. Not that this means that I won't upgrade again in November, but it does provide an extra impetus to do it. The upshot here is that I'm going to need to generate a backup of my settings etc. so that I can restore them in Lucid.

User files

Thankfully my /home directory is in fact another partition, which makes it easier to keep, and provides a nearby backup location for all the other files that I've modified that don't live there.

Installed packages:

Thankfully apt remembers which packages the user installed, and which were installed as dependencies. Thus, after much forum searching, I've come up with the following line to grab all the manually installed packages:

aptitude search '~i!~E' | grep -v "i A" | cut -d " " -f 4 | sort | uniq > manual

This searches for all installed (~i) not-Essential (!~E) packaages, removing (-v) those that were installed automatically ("i A"). The descriptions are then removed (cut) and the list sorted and made unique. Since this is quite a big list (and I want to keep it so I can install them back) I threw this into a file.

I plan to run the same line in the new install, and then just ignore any packages already there. I'll probably take the opportunity to re-evaluate what I have installed too.

Config files

Modified config files are so easy to overlook. I expect that everyone's modified a config file somewhere, probably the apache config? These are somewhat harder to find unless you know what you've modified. If you've used gedit to modify them then remembering that it makes backup copies of the files it mods by appending a ~ to the name can give a clue. Beyond that I've not found a foolproof way to locate them, If anyone finds one let me know!

Application Data

Also (sort-of) in this category are things such as any LDAP or MYSQL databases that you might have lying around that you may want to keep.

Extra Repos

I forget to have a look at what repos I had added to my defaults, damn. Be sure you don't!