I’m currently using OpenSUSE TW and I’m definitely OK with the present setup. However, I need to reinstall it to rework my partitioning: configure LVM, move /home to separate volume, and encrypt the whole system. What can I do beyond copying home content to reduce or speed up the software installation and environment configuration?
You could make a backup of all in /etc. In that case, when re-configuring the several components, you can always look back at how it looked like earlier. Sometimes you can simple copy old over new (e.g. /etc/hosts), but that is not always the case. Use it to compare with intelligence.
Oh yes, and this time make notes about what you configure different from the standard installation. Helps for future cases.
Speeding up the process can hurt you. Given the above situation I definitely prefer to start from scratch and write down steps performed after completing the install.
I must agree that saving existing configuration data is the safest way to go, I’ve been bitten by apparent bugs when not having a clean /home. I back up all my system files like the apache stuff and fstab and a few others and also all the stuff from my home which is important. As a way to keep lots of stuff separate from my home directory I have a separate partition called work which is where I have all the stuff like documents and programs which are not part of the system install and then once the new install is completed I link my work to my home. I can then configure the stuff I need to from the backups as has been said with a bit of common sense. Since doing this I’ve not had any issues caused by mismatched config files.
Stuart
Stale plugins and caches: https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/531650-Konqueror?p=2870087#post2870087
I’m not quite sure if this is what you mean but what I do is I have a bunch of install scripts like this one below
zypper in cmake kernel-source kernel-devel kernel-syms gcc gcc-c++ linux-glibc-devel binutils gcc9 gcc10
I’ve got this one because i used to use the NVIDIA drivers in which event you needed the above before you could install the NVIDIA drivers. I don’t anymore I use Radeon now but I still have this script just in case I go back to NVIDIA.I also have one for multimedia as well as other installs like Vbox wine and handbrake.
I’ve also made and install checklist which I printed up and follow whenever I need to do a reinstall of tumbleweed which has almost never happened but there nonetheless in case it does happen. Perhaps this could help you.
I second hcvv advice. Backup /etc then use it with a diff tool.
Use this command to figure which packages were manually selected for installation:
zypper pa -i | grep ^i+
Also, install etckeeper on the new system so you can track changes to /etc as a git repository.