[Chugalug] Reinstalling Linux

[John Aldrich]

On Sat November 3 2012 11:26:20 PM James Nylen wrote:

I always find the process of reinstalling an OS very painful, and I try to do 
it as rarely as possible.  But, I'm running Ubuntu 10.10 on my main PC, and it 
is really starting to show its age, along with some strange quirks.  The last 
straw is that gnome-panel refuses to display the system-monitor applet now.  I 
like having those important system health indicators always visible.


(I'm probably going to switch to plain Debian next, or maybe something like 
Bodhi - I want nothing to do with unity on my desktop).


The problem is that I have a lot of custom configuration (Apache with a fairly 
extensive custom config and related scripts, a few important patches installed, 
custom window manager setup, etc.) that will be pretty time-consuming to redo.


So here's my question: in the future, how can I minimize the time spent on 
annoying things like configuring my webserver how I want after a reinstall? 
 Any good methods for lightweight application virtualization?


Also, is there a way that I can take my current machine, turn it into a VM, 
and keep it running until I can get services back up in a new install? 
 Preferably all this would happen with minimal downtime.


Just as an aside... there are "spins" of Ubuntu that don't use Unity. Only the 
main Gnome-centric version uses Unity, AFAIK. For example, there's XUbuntu, 
Kubuntu, etc. :D
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://chugalug.org/pipermail/chugalug/attachments/20121104/b61abf32/attachment-0001.html>