I love running the 10.04 Netbook Remix of Ubuntu but when I upgraded to 10.10 I found that my system was mostly unusable. I'm running a Dell Inspiron 600m and I keep finding more and more bugs related to this hardware as Ubuntu matures. In my 10.04 upgrade I lost suspend and then the 10.10 upgrade became unusable. 10.10 would lock-up whenever I hovered over the side panel.
I tried to downgrade by pinning all of the packages to the 10.04 version but perl ran into a priority loop and I had to do a fresh install from my 10.04 pen drive. I had a complete backup of my home drive on the server so I was able to copy that back to the fresh install and get back up pretty fast.
I used rsync to create the backup on the server:
$cd /
$rsync -avz /home/spinlock/ spinlock@server-name:~/backups/home/spinlock/
This will synchronize the files in /home/spinlock/ on the local machine onto /home/spinlock/backups/home/spinlock on the server "server-name". the flags "avz" tells rsync to run in archive mode, be verbose on the output, and compress the data in transit to speed things up.
After downgrading from 10.10 to 10.04 failed I reinstalled from the pen drive. Once I had the base system installed I upgraded all of the packages on the system:
$sudo apt-get update
$sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
Note - I used dist-upgrade so that the linux packages would be updated.
I had to set-up Java, Eclipse, and Chrome before restoring my home directory:
Java -
$sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.cononical.com/ lucid partner"
$sudo apt-get update
$sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk
Eclipse -
$sudo apt-get eclipse eclipse-jdk
Chrome -
$sudo add-apt-repository ppa: chromium-daily
$sudo apt-get update
$sudo apt-get install chromium-browser
Clean-Up -
$sudo apt-get autoremove
Now to restore the home directory:
$cd /
$sudo rsync -avz spinlock@server-name:~/backups/home/spinlock/ /home/spinlock
This pulls the backup directory from the server and synchronizes the local machine with it. In the future, you can quickly backup your local machine by runing:
$cd /
$rsync -avz /home/spinlock/ spinlock@server-name:~/backups/home/spinlock/
This will synchronize the backup directory on the server with the home dir for spinlock on the local machine. rsync is smart enough that it will calculate which files have changed and only send them to the server. This saves a lot of time and space duplicating information. I also like rsync better than creating huge tar balls because I was actually able to restore with rsync and I don't think I've ever brought a system back from a tar ball :)
Now to put a 9.04 version in a separate partition to see which linux upgrade killed the suspend functionality.
