Today’s post is really a note to myself more than anything else and it may strike a chord with you too… I am not blessed with lots of computers so I prefer to use my best one, which runs Kubuntu 8.10 with KDE 4.2.2 for many tasks (communications, project management, business tools & data, software development and… some gaming).

When a new upgrade comes along while it might not take too long to get myself back to a previous ‘state’ what often can occur is that something, anything, will catch me out and get me ‘hacking’ away to fix it so I can finish the install and have it working – this can be from one hour to several days. Of course this is not acceptable in terms of having a productive workstation for getting things done.

To curb the desire to be up at the front all the time is hard but common sense must prevail – there’s nothing wrong about running your workstation a little bit behind the latest release and while it might feel cool to be using the latest and greatest releases of software one does not always have the resource nor the time to spare when client work or family life has taken precedence, from a professional perspective one must treat it as a “production” environment and not tinker with it at the expense of jeopardizing countless hours to get things resolved – the problem when your work is your hobby is that it can get a bit obsessive and distracting, discipline needs to be applied.

A balance always has to be struck and that’s why when you conduct change in your own environment there has to be a plan / business-case / procedure / audit thought through before you click “upgrade”. Why?  Well, it’s worth remembering controlled environments are designed to produce predictable outcomes and that the sequence above is a basic attempt at risk control if you’d not already spotted that

Please make sure you’ve backed up your data and the worst of nightmares will be avoided.

Meanwhile, I think it best to let the dust settle on this one before I launch into it myself – though I am really looking forward to it as I’ve ordered a pair of brand new 500GB Samsung F1 RAID class HDDs I’m going to run in RAID1 and do a fresh install of JJ onto that – should run a dream.

Why the fresh install?  I’m curious to see the difference as it’s practically best-practice for Microsoft Windows machines and try moving that OS from IDE/SATA to a RAID config – anyhow, I digress.  Our hardware guy, Ken, mentioned he’d gone through 4 releases of Ubuntu now without a fresh install and his laptop was still running fine though as I’m moving from single SATA to RAID configuration I’d like to get an automated hand doing the RAID part of the deployment thanks to the install tools on the JJ release setup so that’s probably the main reason encouraging me to go that route and then just move my home directory off the backup snapshot onto the new RAID array once it’s up and running.