It had been a while since I did a fresh install of Ubuntu on my main desktop. I started on that one with 16.04 Xenial and had upgraded to each new LTS since then.
Over time, things had gotten very crufty. Many installed programs that I wasn’t using. Sort of a messy configuration all around. After eight years, it seemed like time for a new start.
I did a couple of backups of my /home partition to the cloud and to a local drive that I had around. Thus armed, I created a new USB installer and set to work.
My first attempt was a failure as I didn’t get the partitioning right. I thought I wanted to mount the drive that I had backed as /home on the new install. For whatever reason, that didn’t work, so I just went with the basic partitioning. That flew through the install. In retrospect, I’m glad I did it that way because I can just mount the drive and cherry pick what I want.
Eventually, I’ll get the setup finished and reformat, copy my new home over and mount that drive as /home but for now I’ll just keep it separate and copy the stuff over as I want it.
One of my new philosophies for this fresh start is to just install the basic stuff on the main host and use containers for all of my projects. I installed Incus and have created a container for my blog. I had to create an ssh-key, register it with Github, install git, clone my blog and then install hugo. That’s where this was written. Overall, the process of creating the container was easy (just like LXD). I’m looking forward to working with my fresh system.