2

I have a five year old Ubuntu system that I've been upgrading, mostly cleanly, but recently there is too much crud in the OS.

I'm planning to do a clean install to lubuntu 12.10.

However, I don't want to lose any of my system configuration. Luckily, /home is in its own partition.

I do know most of my configuration changes are in /etc/ so I will definitely make a backup of that directory.

Is there any script or tool which will let me detect changes made in the OS configuration directories (essentially, detect if there is a diff) so I can more safely do my clean install.

I'm sure without it, I could rebuild a system, but it would definitely save me a lot of time if I knew what has changed.

guntbert
  • 13,134
kfmfe04
  • 8,689
  • 4
  • 18
  • 21
  • 2
    You may use dpkg --get-selections > package_list.txt to list all installed packages but if you migrate to newer Ubuntu version some of them might be not needed anymore. – tommyk Dec 15 '12 at 12:02
  • @tommyk +1 for a good suggestion - however, I am less worried about what packages are installed: it's the configurations that take a lot of time to get right (bind, fstab, mysql.conf, etc...) – kfmfe04 Dec 15 '12 at 12:06
  • This does may not help with your current install, but the next time you do an install, mount your /etc and /home and / in separate partitions. The next time you do an install you can retain your etc and home directories – Hashken Dec 15 '12 at 12:24
  • 1
    http://askubuntu.com/questions/25633/how-to-migrate-user-settings-and-data-to-new-machine – Maythux Feb 21 '14 at 10:22

0 Answers0