I’ve written before (in Greek) about my woes with the pulse audio server in Ubuntu. Every time I fixed it, the whole system crumbled when I performed an update, let alone an upgrade. What I eventually did is to practically give up. I just didn’t have enough time to work on it in order to fix it. The workaround I resorted to was to keep my /home partition fully encrypted on its own partition and then everytime I wanted to upgrade to a later distribution I did a clean re-install of Ubuntu.

The drawbacks of this was that I was still spending too much time re-installing all my tools and applications from scratch. Their configurations were safe in the hidden folders in my /home directory. The process of finding everything and keeping track of what I used and manually install them was getting laborious.

So in the true linux spirit, I did what I guess anyone of you reading this post would do. I just created a small script to get me back to how my system used to be. This script will make a backup copy of the existing repository list first and then replace it will a list that will include all the necessary entries to install the software I need [File1:Lines2-3].

Then a few necessary encryption keys are installed so that certain repositories can be authenticated [File1:Lines4-8]. And from then on there’s a very long line with every single piece of binary I want installed [File1:Line10]. If I find I’m using a new application very often I will add it in the list here and add its repositories in the scripts repository list. Read the rest of this entry »