I am considering moving from Ubuntu to another Linux distribution, most likely Fedora. I'm generally familiar with classic command line tools, and I'm comfortable using both of these distributions, and I've got some general ideas how to proceed. I'm looking for criticism of the approaches I have in mind, tips, or hidden gotchas.
My current system is a dual-boot system, with Windows 7 on a separate hard drive; GRUB2 boots to Ubuntu 11.10 by default. On the drive I use for Ubuntu, I have four partitions: the swap partition, a partition mounted at /, a partition mounted at /home, and another partition containing VM images.
The provisional plan I have is something like this:
- Using a LiveCD with Gparted, reduce the size of the /home partition and the VM image partition to a bit more than the size of the used space, and move them to the end of the drive.
- Delete the partition that was mounted at /, which includes /boot, /bin, /usr, etc. Possibly delete the swap partition as well, since it's trivial to recreate it.
- Install Fedora (or possibly a different Linux distribution) in the unused space, using LVM.
- After configuring the new Linux installation and creating user accounts, mount the old /home partition at some temporary mount point, and copy over stuff like /home/[user]/Documents, but not things like .bashrc that will just confuse matters. Likewise, copy over the VM images.
- After some time has passed and I'm sure I haven't missed any files I want, delete the old /home partition and add that space to the new one via LVM tools.
Criticisms? Tips? Warnings?