General questions FC8

[Dustan]

Hi guys, newer, but damn proud linux user. (4 months clean from my m$ addiction lol) I've test driven several distros, but really have come to enjoy the fedora community, so I guess I have a distro! Now that I have settled on Fedora, I've started optimizing my setup using the resources provided by the knowledgeable fedora community.

You guys really do rock, and let me tell you, you really make it easy for the more inexperienced members.

So here goes, Just a few general question for a bit of clarity. Remember, I'm still pretty much a noob so some of these may have very easy or obvious answers. I'll try to keep most of my questions in here and edit this post to keep it up to date so others may use it as a resource.


SYSTEM SPECS: HP laptop dv8309us
will update with edit when it becomes relevant

 #1     What can I do, or what do I need to learn to "keep what I've done so far" system config-wise?

Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy getting in there and tweaking and configuring but if I need to yum install gsynaptics then nano xorg.conf to enable it one more time I may lose a bit of my sanity. I'm sure there is a better way.

 #2    I also need to work on my quick trigger to reinstall fresh, I know I'm missing out on learning by not correcting what I've broken. Does anyone have beginner friendly link for fixing things I shouldn't have done?

I know I've looked at some logs that have documented changes I've made, cool, but not so useful to me because I've not learned to use this information.




Thanks for the help guys, I hope this thread can be helpful to others some day.

Dustan

[pete_1967]

Not sure what you mean with your first question, but if you mean to ask how you can keep track of changes you've made, best way is to write them down as you go.

One way to do that; if you got only 1 computer in use, create a document and write to it changes you make, where you made them to and what for. Then print the lot out especially if you're planning to resinstall. Alternatively, you can store/ document your changes to backup location or to another server using Wiki for example.

What comes to your second quaestion: It depends what you broke and how. Track back the steps you took from working system to broken one and revert all actions is the brief answer to that.

[bob]

Just a couple of suggestions:

rpm -qa --last | tac

lists the updates, from oldest to newest

If/when you want to rollback to a previous state, perform an rpm update with the --rollback option followed by a date/time specification. Some examples: rpm -Uhv --rollback '9:00 am', rpm -Uhv --rollback '4 hours ago', rpm -Uhv --rollback 'december 25'.

(Both of these were blatantly stolen from intelligent members - I just pass stuff along. )

[Dustan]

Originally Posted by pete_1967

Not sure what you mean with your first question, but if you mean to ask how you can keep track of changes you've made, best way is to write them down as you go.

One way to do that; if you got only 1 computer in use, create a document and write to it changes you make, where you made them to and what for. Then print the lot out especially if you're planning to resinstall. Alternatively, you can store/ document your changes to backup location or to another server using Wiki for example.

What comes to your second quaestion: It depends what you broke and how. Track back the steps you took from working system to broken one and revert all actions is the brief answer to that.

I'm looking for a solution that allows me to quickly return to a "custom configured state". Over the past few weeks I've done quite a few fresh installs which consisted of:
boot live cd
untick the some bloat in pre-install package selection
install 2.6.23.15-137.fc8
boot to gnome
install some things I use like; presto, numlockx, gsynaptics, etc
add some repos
add more packages
update........ which takes a lifetime lol
start hacking into the hardware configs


What I'd like to do is streamline this process, I know there is nothing I can do about some of it, but there must be a way to save some of this??? would I be making a custom spin? is that what I'm looking for. I want a disk or a hd partition with an already updated image with my trimmed package list and my edits to .conf's. Is this possable?

I think I'll look into the custom spins thing, I think I remember skimming through something about it in a fedora faq or blog.


thanks input guys