I always do a full reinstall, and I have kept my /home directories for the life
of the PCs concerned. Never lost one yet. But I usually have at least dual
boot on each machine, so this laptop has 12.04, which I am using now, and 12.10
which I used for the previous post. I will be keeping 12.04 for a short time,
because most of my work is in the corresponding /home, and I have not got around
to using a shared /home area yet. Before 12.04 the root partition had Debian,
and going from Debian to 12.04 was straightforward. The only reason for
abandoning Debian was that the Broadcom drivers were broken and needed a lot of
work to fix, every time the distro was updated. 12.04 also was broken, but not
so badly. 12.10 is broken too, but the fix is only sudo apt-get
remove bcmwl-kernel-source
sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer
b43-fwcutter which is a lot better than it was. Next time maybe it
will be correct? Bug reports have been filed, not on the same hardware, but that
is unimportant in this case (I am using an Acer Aspire 7520, a very solid but
old machine which I have upgraded with two hard drives and the maximum of RAM,
while the first bug
report, with correct fix this time, I saw was a Dell) and I think it is only
the data used by jockey that is wrong, so it should be a quick fix.I still
have to check a few things in 12.10, however lots of the stuff I use has been
installed already and is looking good. When I am completely satisfied, 12.10
will also go on the main root partition, with the other one used maybe for a
later version of Debian or something else. I tend to do much the same on the
main desktop machines as on the laptop, but have not updated them yet. The best
one, the quad core, has AMD/ATI graphics, which are sometimes challenging.
Everything else is Nvidia, and the driver installation this time around is
faultless. I am hoping that Nvidia are really moving towards proper open-source
drivers. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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