[Lazarus] The perfect Linux distro for FPC and Lazarus development

[michael.vancanneyt at wisa.be]

On Mon, 7 Mar 2011, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:

> Op 2011-03-07 11:06, Mark Morgan Lloyd het geskryf:
>> however is that Debian/Ubuntu do have a fairly well-tested mechanism in
>> place for upgrading libraries etc. when necessary, while Slackware- at
>> least when I last looked- has to be reinstalled which is significant work.
>
> I wouldn't know about OS upgrades - even for Ubuntu. I *never* upgrade an OS, 
> but rather install from scratch. With my current partition layout, no matter 
> which Linux distro I use, it is very quick and easy to do.
>
> Using a 250GB disk, I normally have four partitions. One swap partition and 3 
> file partitions. Change sizes to fit your needs.
>
>  swap    2GB
>  /       25GB
>  /home   128GB
>  /opt    95GB
>
> So when a new release of Ubuntu or whatever Linux distro comes out, I backup 
> the /etc directory to my home folder. Then simply reinstall the new OS using 
> the above setup. The root (/) partition is the ONLY partition I format during 
> the new installation. I can then copy back the config files into /etc, or 
> modify the new ones, using the old ones as a reference (I prefer the latter). 
> The /opt partition contains things like Adobe Reader, Firefox beta, Lazarus, 
> FPC and other git repositories - thus no need to reinstall them, after a new 
> OS install. The /home/<username> is used for downloads, documents or any 
> project source code I work on. Again, by simply creating a user account in 
> the new OS, with the same name as before, my desktop and all application 
> settings are automatically correct. All other data are intact too.
>
> This setup has worked very well for me for the last 5+ years, and takes 
> roughly 30 minutes to install a new OS version. I once did a Ubuntu upgrade 
> and it took well over an hour, and lots of issues - so will never do that 
> again.

Strange. The painless upgrades is why I switched from OpenSuSE to Ubuntu.
Never had any troubles, and I am doing this since 8.04.

But as always with computers, "your mileage may vary..."

Michael.