[CALUG] Repairing Ubuntu 8.04 installation, or installing packages to an alternate destination?

[Sean Wilkerson]

Ed,
IMHO, there are really great skills involved in resurrecting a dead
machine especially when it comes to managing critical systems.  This was
the major thing I took away from the experience of getting my RHCE.

However, what I have found is (at least for the time being) there are
many more complications with resurrecting an OS on a laptop than there
are on a server.  Laptops can have wacky hardware and OS distros change
how they deal with that hardware regularly (e.g. My Lenovo T60p built-in
802.11a/b/g card appeared in edgy, feisty, gutsy, hardy, and intrepid as
*ath0* but in Jaunty it is now *wlan0*).

For that reason, on my laptop, I rely heavily on LVM's.  I use
individual lvms for my homedir, workdir, datadir, softwaredir, mediadir,
and anything else special I need.  I reference all of the LVM's in my
fstab via their UUID (see 'man vol_id') and not path/name.  What I
found, is an upgrade (like the one I did from Intrepid --> Jaunty this
past weekend) takes hours to do over the wire and frequently leaves the
system in an unstable state (wonky video and wifi are prime targets).
But, a clean install with the ubuntu alternate installer (note: not the
liveCD) takes me about 45 minutes from start to finish (finish meaning I
am up and doing work).  I don't customize my system much and rely on
packages as much as possible with my special-needs things saved in my
softwaredir lvm for easy retrieval.

This method also allows me to have several LinuxOS lvms that I can
bounce back and forth between very easily, or try new ones whenever I
want to.  Currently I have 2 ubuntu, a fedora, and a debian LinuxOS lvm
that I can boot to as needed.

Sean

Ed Browne wrote:
> Thanks to all who offered their suggestions.  In answer
> to the question "why not just do a new install?", I had
> hoped I could learn something by fixing it, and save
> time in the long run.  But in the end, everything I fixed
> just threw up two more things to fix.  So I went the
> whole hog and (after saving my homedir) installed
> the new Ubuntu 9.04.  Just a few more things left
> to tweak ...
> 
> Thanks again - Ed
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* "sklist at kitterman.com" <sklist at kitterman.com>
> *To:* calug at unknownlamer.org
> *Sent:* Saturday, April 25, 2009 10:25:46 PM
> *Subject:* Re: [CALUG] Repairing Ubuntu 8.04 installation, or installing
> packages to an alternate destination?
> 
> On Sat, 25 Apr 2009 10:05:15 -0700 (PDT) Ed Browne
> <edward_d_browne at yahoo.com <mailto:edward_d_browne at yahoo.com>> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>    I inadvertently, tragically, uninstalled a bunch of packages on
>>my Ubuntu 8.04, including some things necessary for both
>>synaptic and a network connection.
>>    So, short of doing a brand-new install, is there a way to
>>salvage this system?  I'm booted up now on the Ubuntu 8.04
>>install DVD, so can I either
>>a) install the packages I need from the DVD to my hard drive,
>>perhaps targeting a different relative path where I would have
>>mounted my hard drive, like say "/mnt/usr" and so forth.
>>or
>>b) manually install the bare minimum of tools manually
>>on hard drive, and put the rest packages I need on the hard
>>drive, then boot up in the hard drive and install those
>>pre-positioned packages with some form of simple
>>command-line package management?
>>
> Mount the system's hard drive (I use Kubuntu, not Ubuntu, so I can't advise
> you on which GUI tool to do this with), make a new directory and copy the
> .deb files for the packages you need (including their dependencies you may
> have removed) from the dvd into this directory on your system's hard drive
> (anywhere is fine, but in your user home dir somewhere is safest), reboot
> into your system, open a shell and cd into the dir with the .deb's, then
> install the packages using:
> 
> sudo dpkg -i *.deb
> 
> if there are dependency errors, make note of them and try to fix it with:
> 
> sudo apt-get -f install
> 
> Pay close attention to what apt wants to do.  If it doesn't want to remove
> packages, then go ahead, if it does, you didn't get all the packages you
> need.  You'll need to reboot into the dvd and repeat to get the missing
> packages.
> 
> That should allow you to reinstall the missing bits.
> 
> Scott K
> 
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