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!