Reinstall, Not Upgrade

> Question from the newbie zone: I am a RH9 user of a month or so;
> comfortable enough now to give my WinXP box to my son. So I plan to rely
> upon Linux for a long time. (PLUG was a big factor in that feeling of
> comfort!) It's a desktop system.
>
> Are there any things I should be doing NOW (or avoid doing NOW) to make
> that eventual upgrade or reinstall easier? (I'm making this up now,
> but) things like "make sure all your personal files are stored under
> /home/username" or "if you install software, make sure you.." or "don't
> ever change permissions on these folders..." I guess I'm talking about
> principles of good housekeeping / common errors newbies make, that would
> come back with a vengeance when I update later...

Well, keeping all of your personal files in one place is a good idea. The OS is
kinda setup to encourage that. In addition to that I would make /home its own
partition, this way when you update you can just leave that untouched (be aware
that after keeping the same homedir fir several years and OS installs you will
build up a large number of dotfiles (like .uligo in my homedir ... whats that???
actually I know what it is, but only because I recently installed it, two months
from now I will have no clue) and a manual cleanup is eventually useful albeit
somewhat dangerous).

As for backing up (I burn a DVD+RW of /home/ every now and again on my personal
machines), that is a must. In addition to backing up I keep my homedir
synchronized between three machines using unison. It works cross platform too
(never tried it though).

Also, I keep a download directory where I try to keep software I have had to
download and install because they weren't with the standard distribution. This
gets sizable but can be deleted most of the time anyway since by the time you
reinstall there will be a new version of whatever you were saving. I figured
that since I have the drive space I might as well use it though. This is also
less usefull since distros have just been getting bigger and bigger. There used
to be a handfull of libs I would have to keep around to reinstall onto a RH
machine a few years ago but this is no longer true.

As far as changing permissions on directories or files, you should be careful
about that for security reasons.

Good luck
Austin