Last week I spent some time playing with DreamLinux (again), trying to get it onto a thumb-drive / memory-stick / whatever-you-call-those-things (again). Dream hosed my system (again). This time I lost my swap?!?! I’m sorry guys, but that installer sucks! It’s just as well, there were a few changes that I had been wanting to do to my system anyways which would require a complete reinstall.
The procedure that I basically follow is:
- Backup home. You have to do this as root, so that hoses the ownership of all the files. I know there is a way to do it correctly and preserve the ownership, but it actually does not matter that much – see further below.
- Install the system wiping the drive(s) clean.
- Install critical updates. In the case of Mint I do only levels 1 and 2. I am running Mint 5, which is based on Ubuntu 8.04, so at this point I also install the top bugs from Ubuntu 8.04.2.
- Clean the system – remove things that you definitely do not want. Install restricted drivers.
- Create a second “administrator” account, log in to populate the home.
- Crete all other users, log in to each to populate their home. I have an (apparently) weird habit of putting all my users into the group “users” as opposed to the default group == username, and giving their home 700 permissions.
- Log in as the “administrator” and restore backups. Can’t restore (or backup for that matter) my own home when I am using it. I used to get around this by running a live-CD, but this seems like so much less work. Change owner and group of all the user’s files to themselves.
- Install all apps.
- Get my kids to install all games.
There is one app that, IMHO, should get special attention: Eclipse. Eclipse has it’s own package management built in. I normally install Eclipse along with any plugins that I want through Synaptic, and then I “pin” them – lock that version – so that Synaptic or Mint Update will not try to update these. I then go into Eclipse – have to run it as root in this case – and update the whole thing from within Eclipse.
