may have to reinstall

[jonny75904]

So I may end up needing to reinstall linux on my box. It was working great until transmission torrent came into the picture.

The places menu is hosed, DVDs won't play (totem opens and closes itself) and a menagerie of other UI bugs.

We have media files we would like to keep. To what degree does linux need to be reinstalled to fix bugs? Can I rerun the install, or do I need to crush partitions and start over?

[MikeTbob]

You do not need to "Crush Partitions" unless you want to, you could just stick the installer CD into the drive and proceed as usual for installing Linux, letting it do all the work for you. Now if you are feeling brave and have some free time on your hands.......try a new distro, just for snorts and giggles.

[Jonathan183]

So I may end up needing to reinstall linux on my box. It was working great until transmission torrent came into the picture.

The places menu is hosed, DVDs won't play (totem opens and closes itself) and a menagerie of other UI bugs.

We have media files we would like to keep. To what degree does linux need to be reinstalled to fix bugs? Can I rerun the install, or do I need to crush partitions and start over?

Try a new user account first and see if that helps ... if not then the reinstall will overwrite root partition and will try to overwrite the home partition (if you created a separate one). There should be no need to delete and recreate partitions. If you do reinstall a separate home partition is a good move, you can save data and settings - just make sure you don't select format home partition as well.

Watch out for Ubuntu trying to claim the whole hard drive - which last time I installed it was the default setting.

[jonny75904]

Well, its not claiming the whole drive, just the whole partition it is on. I built this computer about a year and a half ago, and split the drive into 3 partitions, a long established habit.

I had a 100GB, and 2 200GB(ish) logical partitions, and all three were ntfs partitions. Before I installed, I copied everything from the last partition, and recreated it as a 180GB ext3 partition....the remaining 17GB went to a swap partition. A bit excessive I know, but, I had it to spare.

But I don't have a separate partition for /home. just a large ext3 filesystem. I don't suppose there's a partition magic style application that can split my partition for this, is there?

[MikeTbob]

the remaining 17GB went to a swap partition. A bit excessive I know, but, I had it to spare.

But I don't have a separate partition for /home. just a large ext3 filesystem. I don't suppose there's a partition magic style application that can split my partition for this, is there?

HOLY Snapping duck turds!(just joshin ya)
I would suggest that you do not create a swap of that size. Tell us how much RAM you have and we can suggest a more appropriate size.

Yes, there are several partition editors.
gparted is very good, and it comes on a LiveCD.
GParted -- Live CD/USB/PXE/HD
I would also suggest that you do create a /home partition too, a minimum of 5GB is good.
Good Luck and do let us know how it goes.

[Jonathan183]

HOLY Snapping duck turds!(just joshin ya)

Max swap 1GB unless you have lots of RAM and want to suspend to disk. If GParted does not work then try PartedMagic ... IMHO does a much better job than partition magic

[Bemk]

I know there was some rule which said that up to some ammount of RAM you should take the RAM size 2 times for a swap partition, but I guess that if you just set to 1 GB you will have enough. I have 512 MB and I barely use my swap, so I guess you won't be using it at all.

[MikeTbob]

I know there was some rule which said that up to some ammount of RAM you should take the RAM size 2 times for a swap partition, but I guess that if you just set to 1 GB you will have enough. I have 512 MB and I barely use my swap, so I guess you won't be using it at all.

That was an old rule, which just doesn't apply in these days of most machines running GB's of RAM. I'd say if you have 512 MB you should be okay with 512 MB Swap as well, unless you use sleep/hibernate.

[Bemk]

ok, but right now it's seyt to 1.3 GB, because Ubuntu suggested it when installing it the first time (which is about a year ago now, reason for a small party I suppose). I have no experience with Linux from before the moment I tried Ubuntu.

[Jonathan183]

ok, but right now it's seyt to 1.3 GB, because Ubuntu suggested it when installing it the first time (which is about a year ago now, reason for a small party I suppose). I have no experience with Linux from before the moment I tried Ubuntu.

As I put in post #6 max swap 1GB unless you want to suspend to disk ... Ubuntu will not know if you intend doing this so is likely to play it safe & allocate additional swap space to allow suspend to disk (unless either the free space is not available or you tell Ubuntu not to) ... and did someone mention party !