Saturday, March 12, 2011

Natty install

We've moved into Alpha3 and beyond and I've been running a distribution upgrade from Maverick for a while now. So, I took the opportunity to test a clean install this morning and it's been a huge success.

A:
  • Downloaded the alpha3 .iso and burnt it to disc.
  • Shoved it in the drive and watched it do it's stuff
  • Selected "get updates" and "install restricted drivers"
  • Before long it was installed and ready to go (am liking the new Unity interface)
B:
Mount the various partitions. I'd previously set up my machine so that the main drive is partitioned into:
  • sda1: 50Gb - Windows
  • sda2: 50Gb - Linux
  • sda3: the rest - data
So, after doing a clean install onto sda2, I mounted sda3 to /home and another drive to /backup.
  • Create the folders that you want to mount the drives to
  • List your drives to make sure you know where they are: "sudo fdisk -l"
  • Test that they mount okay: "mount /dev/sda3 /home"
  • Add a link to /etc/fstab "/dev/sda3/ /home defaults 0 0"
  • Remove the previous mount: "sudo umount /home"
  • Use fstab to mount all: "sudo mount -a"
C:
Install some helpful programs
  • sudo apt-get install joe guake geany gdebi
Install some programs from downloaded debs: for some reason, installing them with the software centre triggers an error in alpha, so I just used gdebi to install them and everything worked fine. With ~/.chrome unaffected by the reinstall, all the previous settings were preserved.
  • chrome
  • dropbox
  • skype
Install Crashplan (ensuring that the jre from the restricted extras in installed). Adopt the old version of the machine so that a new seed of data isn't required. Copy over CrashPlanRemote (see previous blog post).

D:
Setup apache, PHP, mysql etc.
  • sudo apt-get install php5 apache2 mysql-server phpmyadmin
Copy over /etc/hosts and the config files from sites-available and then use "sudo a2ensite blah" to enable them; follow that with a "sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload" and everything should be working. Import data into mysql.

E:
Passwordless login is key to great workflow. Because ~ was preserved (on a partition unaffected by the reinstall), my ~/.ssh directory was unchanged. So, after /etc/hosts was reinstated, passwordless login was back up and running.

All in all - a complete reinstall in less than 2 hours!

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