A natty downgrade

July 4, 2011 4:20 AM

How to downgrade ubuntu?

I have 11.04 on my computer. I have / on a separate partition with my home directory on another.

I want to reinstall 10.10 which I found a lot better and more stable. Is it simply a case of putting in the 10.10 cd and installing over the root partition or will I have stuff in my home partition that will conflict with the older files?

I have a few ppas in so it's probably best to remove them first I guess?

Anything else I'd need to know?

posted by quaisi to computers & internet (6 answers total)

Your plan sounds good. Keeping a separate /home was wise. Make sure you select it for mounting but not formatting on the installer (or just ignore it at install and add to fstab later if you are confortable doing that).

The fresh install will replace your apt sources, so your ppa's will be gone. Make sure to format / (root) even if the installer complains there is already another system there (your 11.04). You can re-add the ppas after installation.

It is unlikely anything in your /home will give you trouble. Might wanna keep a copy of your /etc in case you made any fancy configuration that you might wanna keep.
posted by CautionToTheWind at 4:47 AM on July 4, 2011

Most problems are the new Unity interface. Try using classic Gnome desktop first. You should have the option to go into it at the login screen.
posted by Yavsy at 4:55 AM on July 4, 2011

Keep your old /home unmounted during install, let it create a new /home on the / partition, then fixup fstab. You want to have a fresh version of the 10.10 default user directory to reference if anything doesn't work after downgrading. Some of your current /home config files may be from more recent versions of programs than the 10.10 versions you're going back to.
posted by zengargoyle at 5:12 AM on July 4, 2011

Back up /etc as well (just copy it into your home directory). I can't tell you how many times I've had to look up some damn Samba option after reinstalling....
posted by ish__ at 5:20 AM on July 4, 2011

Thanks for the extremely fast responses! I use Classic desktop already. It's more to do with a hundred little niggles adding up to frustration...
posted by quaisi at 5:40 AM on July 4, 2011

Look into Kubuntu. It has finally flourished.
posted by CautionToTheWind at 9:16 AM on July 4, 2011