Installing Maverick anew; Cliff Notes version

I was going to write a long rant/whine about my botched upgrade and re-install of Maverick on 10/8, but it's both painful and boring. That said, being back on a horrible install of Lucid (KDE on top of 32-bit Ubuntu) is painful and boring. ESCAPE!

My zsync trick didn't work, since I didn't want a liveCD, but the alternate install. And the torrent stopped working, probably courtesy of Comcast. Thanks, Comcast! Wget, however, works wonderfully. For instance, this is the command I used:

wget http://releases.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/maverick/kubuntu-10.10-alternate-amd64.iso

Less than ten minutes later, I have my image, and can write it to the thumb-drive. While the ISO is downloading and writing to the drive, I need to figure out where /home is, so I save that.

I'll spare you reading my over-long novel about a botched Lucid upgrade/re-install, by culling the highlights. Use

sudo blkid

to see your partitions. This time, what I see is:

/dev/sda1: UUID="28de0df5-ddbb-4bf9-a61a-e7a5aa007f2a" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda5: UUID="dfe16a55-80c3-42c8-937a-4341cb2886c8" TYPE="swap"
/dev/sda6: LABEL="home" UUID="1e3555c0-f248-446e-a9a7-6a42ab95eced" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sdb1: LABEL="New Volume" UUID="0741-0B7E" TYPE="vfat"

/dev/sda1 is my present Lucid install, which I conclude by process of elimination. I'll be glad to see THAT disappear! Sda5 swap is swap, which will stay as-is. Look at that LABEL="home" on sda6 -- that stays put. The sdb1 New Volume is my thumb-drive.

One of the reasons my last Lucid install experience was such a nightmare, was that I was already stressed because of the botched upgrade, and consequent dead laptop. Within the alternate install windows, I didn't realize I could still access the command prompt, by using

ctrl+alt+f1

. Try that; you can use it any time, anywhere! While there, maco told me to use

sudo mount /dev/sda5 /media ; ls /media

to see what was in sda5, and then we stepped through all of them, so see which was /home. Remember to

sudo umount /media

before stopping, or

sudo umount /media ; sudo mount /dev/sda6 /media ; ls /media

if you are going to continue to step through your partitions, and

ls

(list) the contents. Of course substitute the numbers you see in your own

blkid

command.

I'll write about the actual install when I do it tomorrow. Wish me luck!