Clone and Expand XP

[Christopher Browne]

On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 12:33 PM, Kevin Cozens <kevin-4dS5u2o1hCn3fQ9qLvQP4Q at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On 12-05-01 12:20 PM, phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org wrote:
>> Windows folks periodically cleanse their hard drive: wipe the hard drive,
>> re-install their operating system, and then re-install every last
>> application that they need. This is a very foreign way of thinking in the
>> Linux world, as the folks on this list will know.
>
>
> It should be a foreign way of thinking. Just think about how often you (we)
> have seen people suggesting that it is better to re-install the latest
> version of a distro from scratch instead of trying to use its update/upgrade
> feature.

I do like that Debian has developed this to a pretty extreme degree,
but I still appreciate that there are cases where a careful
arrangement of "install from scratch" has merits.

The very first time I installed Linux, I made sure I had /home and
/usr/local on separate partitions so that I had a ready option of
re-installing some other distribution without destroying my important
data.  I consider data to be more important than the software, since
installing fresh software has been made pretty easy.  (And things were
really not so terribly awful in the mid-90s.)

It used to be that it was an interesting idea to try out the latest &
greatest distribution from someone else to see what oddities they
introduced.  There were some neat things in Caldera OpenDesktop, back
before they "turned evil."

I think there's a fair bit of merit to having your processes set up to
make it as easy as possible to install from scratch and recover,
pretty nearly automatically, into a usable state.  There's some pretty
good material discussing how to do that well:
<http://www.infrastructures.org/>

The use of Virtual Machines (kvm, xen, VMware, and such) also
represents an "accent" that sounds rather a lot like what you're
recommending not to do.
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists