Reinstalling Ubuntu

One thing that really frightens me is reinstalling an OS and keeping the "lights on" with regards to my personal data and extra apps.  For this reason, I have never reinstalled the OS on my main workstation.  In fact, when I upgraded from an old dell laptop to a desktop machine, I only moved the HDD over and ran it as is.  The original install was 32 bit and was at least 7 years old.

Not that I don't upgrade.  It started as plain Ubunutu.  It didn't take long before I decided I was a KDE person and I "converted" it to Kubuntu.  At some point the new KDE came out and I decided to try unity since by that time it was already part of the upgrade.  It didn't take long to throw that out and "convert" my dist into Xubuntu.  I've been happy with Xfce but I could tell there was a lot of cruft running around from the previous desktops.

Enter windows 8.  Back when I bought my new desktop, it came preinstalled with win8 and had UEFI enabled.  Since I was reusing my old install, it required a legacy bios and I was relieved to find that the PC bios supported legacy mode.  However, this meant that windows 8 was no longer bootable.  I could live with that though.  Until I wanted to install a game for windows on my PC.

After doing a little googling, it appeared that grub now supported UEFI and I found this nifty program boot-repair which aims to fix things properly.  So I tried to flip the switch to UEFI and try boot-repair only to be told that my current linux install was not compatible with UEFI.  I believe it was because it was 32 bit.   This put me over the edge to do the upgrade to a proper Xubuntu 64 bit install since it is not possible to upgrade from 32 to 64 bit in place.

I made to sure to tell the installer to reuse the existing partition.  This left my home dir intact.  Some of my old /usr/local installs no longer worked, and I had to remember or discover which extra packages I had installed (digikam and kmymoney for example).  But that was mostly quickly solved.  The only rub was that it seemed at some point my gpg public key ring was replaced by an empty one.  My secret ring was still in place, but gpg won't run without the public key.

I am still not sure what happened, but thankfully I did back up my home dir to the windows partition before installing Xubuntu and was able to copy my public ring back and all looks good.

Hopefully this is the last I have to write about this experience.  It went surprisingly well - even to the point where it seemed less painful than an upgrade.