Clean Installs are Remarkable
 

I cannot believe that we are at F16. I clearly recall RH9 to FC-1. But I
digress. I know that others have said this in the past. I just thought
that I would reinforce the notion that clean installs remove a large
number of annoying problems that persist through upgrades. Moreover, it
is refreshing to start with a clean desktop; something that has become
a palette for the way we think and do things.

It has been awhile and I was unaware of the many advances that
developers have made in installation. It has never been this easy,
intuitive and fast.

I was in a Walgreens the other day and picked up a bunch of Sony DVD's
for 40 cents each. There was a time when burning a DVD through Linux
was a considerable challenge. Now it is routine --- and cheap. The
perfect excuse for backing up the accumulated bytes; It makes you think
what you really want to retain. Then wiping the HD clean.
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Clean Installs are Remarkable
 

On 12/21/2011 07:06 PM, Fedora User wrote:

It has been awhile and I was unaware of the many advances that
developers have made in installation. It has never been this easy,
intuitive and fast.


That's good to know. Even if I manage to get this desktop cleaned up
and working, I'm considering saving up enough money to upgrade to a new
mobo. (This one's been working for about eight years, now, and is
showing its limitations.) When I do, there's no reason not to get one
with enough RAM to need a 64 bit system, meaning, of course, a clean
install. Hearing how easy it is is very good news.

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Clean Installs are Remarkable
 

On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 3:28 AM, Joe Zeff <joe@zeff.us> wrote:
> On 12/21/2011 07:06 PM, Fedora User wrote:
>>
>> It has been awhile and I was unaware of the many advances that
>> developers have made in installation. It has never been this easy,
>> intuitive and fast.
>
>
> That's good to know. *Even if I manage to get this desktop cleaned up and
> working, I'm considering saving up enough money to upgrade to a new mobo.
> *(This one's been working for about eight years, now, and is showing its
> limitations.) *When I do, there's no reason not to get one with enough RAM
> to need a 64 bit system, meaning, of course, a clean install. *Hearing how
> easy it is is very good news.

I agree whole-heartedly - I have been doing almost exclusively clean
installs for many years - with suitable forward planning it is
possible to do an install, configure the new system and bring users
back from backup files within about two and a half to three hours -
possibly a little longer for systems with a number of server
functions.

However my experience has been that clean installs done with
intelligent planning and using backup files for configs and user files
saves a considerable amount of time overall, and gives the new system
a better likelihood for running well without the almost inevitable
problems that have come from the upgrade of an older system.

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Clean Installs are Remarkable
 

On 12/22/2011 02:31 AM, mike cloaked wrote:

the almost inevitable
problems that have come from the upgrade of an older system.


And I've been doing upgrades for years and this is the first time I've
ever had the slightest bit of trouble. What "almost inevitable
problems" are you referring to?

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Clean Installs are Remarkable
 

On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 6:24 PM, Joe Zeff <joe@zeff.us> wrote:
> On 12/22/2011 02:31 AM, mike cloaked wrote:
>>
>> the almost inevitable
>> problems that have come from the upgrade of an older system.
>
>
> And I've been doing upgrades for years and this is the first time I've ever
> had the slightest bit of trouble. *What "almost inevitable problems" are you
> referring to

It depends on what changes in a variety of packages in the new system
have been made and how well the upgrade has gone. Of course there is
more than one way to do so - yum upgrade or preupgrade route. I have
done yum upgrades on a system where there was difficult direct access
and it was "easier" to upgrade than try to gain access to clean
install.

However I have found selinux context issues and at other times
dependency issues with yum upgrades - even with fn to fn+1. I have to
admit I have only done yum upgrades and not used pre-upgrade mainly
due to the difficulties I have seen reported on the list.

I have also done a yum upgrade leading to a non-bootable system that I
ended up clean installing as it was quicker than trying to diagnose
what had gone wrong with the upgrade.

Since the problems I had with that route I abandonned trying and stuck
with clean installs - and not had any problems since - the last one I
did was a progressive upgrade via yum from f11 to f14 changing by one
version at a time - and resolving all the dep issues and selinux
issues along the way - it took ages but on that system I did not have
easy direct clean install access since I was connected remotely. It
did work but I balked at moving to f15 - eventually that machine was
taken out of service and I replaced its functions with a new machine.

Of course others may largely have had no problems with ugrades and
maybe I was just the one unlucky one! Anyway with all the QA testing
on recent versions as well as the QA testing of the upgrade path
perhaps my experience of it is simply outdated.


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Clean Installs are Remarkable
 

On 22.12.2011 20:29, mike cloaked wrote:
> Of course others may largely have had no problems with ugrades and
> maybe I was just the one unlucky one! Anyway with all the QA testing
> on recent versions as well as the QA testing of the upgrade path
> perhaps my experience of it is simply outdated.

i made some hundret dist-upgrades since 2006 with yum
yes they are sometimes not "start and forget" but it takes
me 1-3 days after a fresh-install (many services, customized
configs) and so i prepare dist-upgrades on ONE virtual machine

there are important packages rebuilt from source with removed
restart of services due update, newer versions than fedora for
many reasons and after the preparing each dist-upgrade on the
other servers takes 5-7 minutes while all services are running
and 20-30 seconds for the reboot

i see no reason to go the windows "install from scratch" way
on a linux system since you can check all things before reboot
and yes you are responsible to do this as admin

maybe on simple-minded machines with no customizations a fresh
install is the faster way, but soch browse-only and "eat what i
get" setups do not interest me in any way


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Clean Installs are Remarkable
 

On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 5:01 AM, Reindl Harald <h.reindl@thelounge.net> wrote:
>
>
> On 22.12.2011 20:29, mike cloaked wrote:
>> Of course others may largely have had no problems with ugrades and
>> maybe I was just the one unlucky one! *Anyway with all the QA testing
>> on recent versions as well as the QA testing of the upgrade path
>> perhaps my experience of it is simply outdated.
>
> i made some hundret dist-upgrades since 2006 with yum
> yes they are sometimes not "start and forget" but it takes
> me 1-3 days after a fresh-install (many services, customized
> configs) and so i prepare dist-upgrades on ONE virtual machine

How long does it take to prepare that first one?

Preupgrade took me about 44 hours, F14 to F15. Yum upgrade would have
been about the same, according to my past experiences.

> there are important packages rebuilt from source with removed
> restart of services due update, newer versions than fedora for
> many reasons and after the preparing each dist-upgrade on the
> other servers takes 5-7 minutes while all services are running
> and 20-30 seconds for the reboot

But I'm sure you didn't have 3,450 packages in you virtual machines.

> i see no reason to go the windows "install from scratch" way
> on a linux system since you can check all things before reboot
> and yes you are responsible to do this as admin
>
> maybe on simple-minded machines with no customizations a fresh
> install is the faster way, but soch browse-only and "eat what i
> get" setups do not interest me in any way

I generally don't do install from DVD because there will always be the
first yum update after the install, to kill a bit of time. I use the
netinstall image to get fresh installs. That way, the packages are
fresh when the install ends. Also, I tend to start out with a lot
fewer packages on the fresh install, bring my /etc tweaks and such
back, and bring the other packages back as I need them.

Just different ways of doing things.

But I do wish the upgrade weren't so much of a chasm to cross every
six months. Also wish my laptop hadn't died. Upgrades hurt less when
you still have a machine to work from.
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Clean Installs are Remarkable
 

On 23.12.2011 01:04, Joel Rees wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 5:01 AM, Reindl Harald <h.reindl@thelounge.net> wrote:
>> i made some hundret dist-upgrades since 2006 with yum
>> yes they are sometimes not "start and forget" but it takes
>> me 1-3 days after a fresh-install (many services, customized
>> configs) and so i prepare dist-upgrades on ONE virtual machine
>
> How long does it take to prepare that first one?
>
> Preupgrade took me about 44 hours, F14 to F15. Yum upgrade would have
> been about the same, according to my past experiences.

what the hell takes 44 hours?

on mobile-internet maybe
i do not calculate one-time download

>> there are important packages rebuilt from source with removed
>> restart of services due update, newer versions than fedora for
>> many reasons and after the preparing each dist-upgrade on the
>> other servers takes 5-7 minutes while all services are running
>> and 20-30 seconds for the reboot
>
> But I'm sure you didn't have 3,450 packages in you virtual machines.

no 1,7134 - do not forget the devel-stuff
but who acres on modern ahrwadre and 100Mbit WAN?

> But I do wish the upgrade weren't so much of a chasm to cross every
> six months.

if you have a problem with the every six months fedora is wrong for
you - but if you like fresh software CentOS is wrong for you

you can not have frehs software and no big upgrades
not now and not in the future

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Clean Installs are Remarkable
 

On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 9:10 AM, Reindl Harald <h.reindl@thelounge.net> wrote:
>
>
> On 23.12.2011 01:04, Joel Rees wrote:
>> On Fri, Dec 23, 2011 at 5:01 AM, Reindl Harald <h.reindl@thelounge.net> wrote:
>>> i made some hundret dist-upgrades since 2006 with yum
>>> yes they are sometimes not "start and forget" but it takes
>>> me 1-3 days after a fresh-install (many services, customized
>>> configs) and so i prepare dist-upgrades on ONE virtual machine
>>
>> How long does it take to prepare that first one?
>>
>> Preupgrade took me about 44 hours, F14 to F15. Yum upgrade would have
>> been about the same, according to my past experiences.
>
> what the hell takes 44 hours?

about 12 hours download
about 2 hours in busy-cursor preparing this and preparing that
about 4 hours in checking dependencies
about 12 hours for the install
about 12 hours for the cleanup

I don't know where the other 2 hours went, but I started at 7 one
morning, finally got the "really upgrade?" prompt before I sent the
kids to bed, got up in the middle of the night to check it (still
resolving dependencies), had to use my son's 12 year old iBook to work
that day, ended sometime before 5 am the following morning, just in
time to check google maps and get to a special seasonal assignment.

Probably would be somewhat faster if I had more than 768M RAM. LVM
fragmentation may be slowing things down. (I've added to /var twice
so that yum upgrade and preupgrade would have have room to cache the
downloads. I guess next time I'll just migrate /var to the new drive I
bought last summer.) Speaking of LVM fragmentation, there's another
reason it may be reasonable to just do a fresh install.

Sempron 2600 (1.7GHz, single processor) since you ask. Yeah, I wish I
could afford a multi-processor mobo. I know that would have sped up
the dependency check and transaction checks. And lots of RAM would be
great for VMs, which, yeah, I want to be able to use. As you point
out, they should make the transition a bit easier.

And right now, I'm fussing with a bug in the login dialog, where it
adds lots of nologin users and then won't scroll. Had to
blind-down-cursor to the others item in the login list to login by
name on the user I surf the web on, so I could look at google maps.
Not sure whether I should fuss with that more today or just get back
to work, however.

> on mobile-internet maybe

1M ADSL. Can't afford to go optical.

> i do not calculate one-time download

12 hours with the machine on is twelve hours with the machine on.
Yeah, I was doing other work, but it was also maxing my connection.
And checking to make sure I wasn't stalled. Not full-block, but not
free.

>>> there are important packages rebuilt from source with removed
>>> restart of services due update, newer versions than fedora for
>>> many reasons and after the preparing each dist-upgrade on the
>>> other servers takes 5-7 minutes while all services are running
>>> and 20-30 seconds for the reboot
>>
>> But I'm sure you didn't have 3,450 packages in you virtual machines.
>
> no 1,7134 - do not forget the devel-stuff

17,134 packages? And I thought I had too much in this machine.

> but who acres on modern ahrwadre and 100Mbit WAN?

Do you understand that your prejudices are showing, there?

>> But I do wish the upgrade weren't so much of a chasm to cross every
>> six months.
>
> if you have a problem with the every six months fedora is wrong for
> you - but if you like fresh software CentOS is wrong for you
>
> you can not have frehs software and no big upgrades
> not now and not in the future

Uhm. Yeah. Whatever. My son's iBook also runs openBSD. (I have to
borrow it back regularly, and I use openBSD for some stuff. No, he
does not like openBSD yet.)

The thing is, I have recommended Ubuntu and Fedora to semi-technically
inclined friends in the past. I can't do that any more.

Yeah, I need to get a fat USB drive for playing with Mint and Cent and
such, but my kids need Christmas presents first.

Different ways of doing things, and sometimes there are reasons for
the differences.
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Clean Installs are Remarkable
 

On Fri, 23 Dec 2011 09:04:00 +0900
Joel Rees <joel.rees@gmail.com> wrote:

> I generally don't do install from DVD because there will always be the
> first yum update after the install, to kill a bit of time. I use the

Actually, you can enable the update repo with the dvd install. The
installation will then proceed from the media where possible and yum
when necessary. Thus the newly installed Fedora is already updated.
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