- you too could be part of The Answer Gang, yourself.

   I often use this space to talk about whatever it is I'm up to. I have not
   had  a great month, really - you'd rather not know. Suffice to say I'm
   looking forward to Chinese New Year on February 9th, so that I can declare
   the awful mess as belonging to the previous year, and move on.

   My Star Trek crew is expecting to run the Internet Lounge at my nearby music
   convention, [33]Consonance, first weekend of March. I do believe that our
   "Songs In The Key of Tux" series will be a big hit there - thanks Jimmy!

   Here's to hoping that you and yours are faring better than me and mine have.
   If not, fear not - things do improve. Even if it's up to us at the last to
   make it so - this is a world of choices, and malleable tools like Linux
   allow us the freedom to make the most of them. 'Til next month -- Heather
            ____________________________________________________

(?) Update vs Install, how best to manage /home?

   From Edgar Howell 

    Answered By: Neil Youngman, Thomas Adam, Mike Orr, Benjamin Okopnik. 

   Before I go any further, here is the environment on the machine in question,
   [34]SuSE 9.2 on both drives, no other OS: 

/dev/hda (non-Internet drive, system doesn't even know about a modem, /etc/fsta
b mounts /dev/hdb2)

     1 swap 2 / 3 /home

   /dev/hdb  (the  drive  booted  for  Internet access, /etc/fstab has no
   information about /dev/hda)

     1 swap 2 /

   a) update vs install

   In part because I tend to omit a couple of releases instead of just blindly
   installing  successive releases but also because I used to install new
   software into a new partition and play with it for a while before removing
   the previous version, in the past I have always done a clean installation.
   With  all  that  entailed, creating the users again, /etc/hosts* (SOHO
   network) and the like. 

     (!) [Thomas] When you do a new install a distro (albeit a new one, or an
     upgrade to a new point release of one you currently have) you can instruct
     it not to touch certain partition (like /home). This means you don't have
     to   worry   about   loss  of  data.  You  mentioned  UIDs.  Backup
     /etc/{passwd,shadow} beforehand.

   (?) Recently I experimented with update. It worked well, avoided lots of
   questions  and seemed really neat. But I had again skipped a couple of
   releases and ultimately discovered some problems. 

     (!) [Thomas] I can't see where the contention is. An upgrade saves a lot
     of time, since all you're doing is upgrading the software, nothing more.

     (!) [Mike] I haven't used SuSE much, but that's the general problem you
     get when updating through multiple OS releases. [35]Debian has special
     scripts you're supposed to run to switch releases; they try to automate
     the tricky stuff but sometimes they can't foresee what your configuration
     has turned into. And they have to be run in order without skipping. If you
     don't   update  packages  frequently  and  don't  follow  the  user
     forums/newsletters where potential breakages are discussed, I would stick
     with the clean install and copy your configuration. That way you know
     everything has the latest recommended configuration, whatever that is. It
     also provides a chance to clear out the cruft that has accumulated from
     packages you installed but never used; cruft that may leave droppings in
     the  filesystem when uninstalled since it wasn't built by a clueful
     developer.

     Alternatively, back up your entire system onto your second drive and make
     sure you can boot into it, then update your primary system. That way if
     something breaks you can just blow it away and go back to where you were.

     /home isn't a big deal. If you have it on a separate partition like you
     do, just let the fresh install create its own home directory in the root
     partition. You'll have to do everything as root anyway while you're
     installing, so just pretend home doesn't exist. Then when everything's
     settled, delete the bogus home and mount your real /home partition. Same
     for /usr/local if you store stuff in there. I keep a /mnt/data partition
     with my home and local stuff, and use symlinks to get to them. That also
     lets me have multiple OS versions installed, all sharing the same local
     data. And I can unmount the local data when I'm afraid an upgrade might
     hurt it.

   (?) Under the old version the first user ID was 500 and under 9.2 it is
   1000. That of course caused problems in the above environment: /dev/hdb
   under a completely new installation got new user IDs, /dev/hda under the
   update inherited the old ones. It was fun to re-boot into /dev/hdb after I
   wrote to it having booted from /dev/hda... 

     (!) [Mike] The easiest way is to recreate the users with the same UIDs and
     GIDs they previously had. You may have to run "useradd" manually to do it.
     (Or "adduser" on some systems.) If your UID overlaps with an existing UID
     on the new system, you'll have to compromise somehow. If you give each
     user their own group rather than putting them all into "users", you'll
     have to create the group first. On my Gentoo: