How Long Does it Take You to Tweak a New Box?

An anonymous reader asks: "When you get a new computer, how long does it take to make it 'home'? On a Windows system, there seem to be a huge number of preferences I have to choose before it is really comfortable (doing things like: installing software; changing the wallpaper and color schemes; start menu layout; and so forth). How long do you have to fiddle with computer until you have it set up the way you like? Do you use any shortcuts to speed up the process?"

Comments

On linux...

[peterpi]

Nobody's found out how long it takes on linux, they're still working at it! ;P

Re:On linux...

[ivanmarsh]

Ha farking ha... 1h 45m from install to having a working, up to date and configured system running http, https, php, java, tomcat, mysql, mail server, ftp server, remote X access, and the desktop set up the way I want it... fully firewalled and secure.

Windows: 6 hours from install to just having the current updates.

Any more funny jokes?

Re:On linux...

[ArsonSmith]

Windows - Tweaks for about 4-6 hours and spending about $400 on extra applications
OS X - Tweaks for about 1-2 hours and spending about $600 on extra applications
Linux - Change desktop background. Done.

Re:On linux...

[Technician]

Nobody's found out how long it takes on linux, they're still working at it! ;P

I keep finding things to continue tweaking it. Earlier this year Flash 9 is out. For my kids, just last month the MTP lib came out so they can sync their Zen player. I just found a decent replacement for my stage light console program and I'm just now getting it compiled and installed (Q-Light).

Not bad as a nubie since I first installed Ubuntu when Dapper came out.

Re:On linux...

[paeanblack]

1h 45m from install to having a working, up to date and configured system running http, https, php, java, tomcat, mysql, mail server, ftp server, remote X access

Connect a fresh Windows ME box to the net and you can get all that in 1 minute and 45 seconds.

Re:On linux...

[Sparr0]

Why arent you just keeping your /home partition backed up? When I installed Kubuntu I let it run overnight with a huge batch of things to download and install. That took about 10 minutes to set up. Then another 15 minutes to copy /home from my old machine. So, call it 25 minutes of work for a fully customized and tweaked installation?

Re:On linux...

[aputerguy]

Agreed. I set up up, customized, and played with FC6 running cygwin on my underpowered XP laptop.
Once that was setup, all I had to do was copy it over to my Linux server and turn on/off a couple of services that I needed on my server but not on my laptop. I mean *literally* just copied the root partition.
It then ran perfectly with all my user and /etc configurations intact.

When I wanted to set up another machine, I used the same root image and only had to edit a small handfull of files to change the machine name/IP address and to change a couple of passswords.

When I upgrade to another machine, all I will need to do is copy (or even just physically move) my hard-disks.

With Windoze, because of the dang registry, you can't just copy or move disks without corrupting everything. Also, since customization is done through menus and stored in obscure parts of the registry, you can't just copy over and/or edit individual config files. Instead, you need to reinstall each application individually and then individually run the program and customize the options by going through endless menus.

Re:On linux...

[misleb]

Why arent you just keeping your /home partition backed up? When I installed Kubuntu I let it run overnight with a huge batch of things to download and install. That took about 10 minutes to set up. Then another 15 minutes to copy /home from my old machine. So, call it 25 minutes of work for a fully customized and tweaked installation?

Kinda like how OS X will do import of your settings/home directory from another comptuer over firewire. Just boot your old computer with 'T' held down and Setup will copy all your users, system preferences, and even applications if you let it.

Overall, I'd say OS X has the shortest "initial setup time" of anything I've used. Although I guess it depends on how many macports you depend on...

-matthew

Re:On linux...

[SadGeekHermit]

I remember when Windows 95 first came out, and a bunch of us (comp sci majors) immediately tried out Linux. One guy who was an assembly language freak (and who knew quite a bit about Windows programming) wrote his own start menu, taskbar, and sort of Windows 95 emulator; he said "why upgrade? looks the same, doesn't it?"

The thing that really burned our asses was the registry and the implementation of long filenames (which worked in Win95, but NOT the DOS underneath it that you could boot to).

We could not figure out why anyone in their right mind would stop using flat files for system configuration. And we asked each other, "how the hell are we going to back up our machines?" The long filenames meant that you couldn't boot to DOS and do a zip backup the way we used to under DOS/Win3.1. You could back up, but never restore, because DOS couldn't put the long filenames back! Oh, how we hated it. If Knoppix had existed back then, it would have been a non-issue, and we would have laughed it off, but you usually couldn't even boot off a CD in those days (which is why Windows came with a boot floppy at the time).

The whole point of the registry is to "make piracy difficult". The ONLY reason they created it in the FIRST place was because Bill Gates et al thought their third-rate operating system was so special and important that to protect it from nasty "pirates" they had to essentially lobotomize it.

UGH.

But, hey! We sure had fun with Linux! So it wasn't ALL bad...

Re:On linux...

[backbyter]

Installing Win XP Pro from CD w/Sp2 takes me about 8 hours on a Compaq V2000Z with 2G RAM with all applications and data.

loopback adapter, printer drivers(2), scanner drivers(3), Palm data (maps, addr book etc), camera drivers
eclipse and add ons, Enterprise Arch, MagicDraw, WSAD5.0 multi-edit, openlazlo server, CSE Val, AGen, VS6, Nemo, zone alarm, firefox, ad aware
MySqlDb and tools, OracleDb and tools, DB2 and tools, test data for the DBs, several versions of JDK's and JRE's.
Whatever current system(s) I'm working on now, and probably a few older ones also.
Then my personal apps and the usual horde of data files.

Pretty much the whole day.

Re:On linux...

[cdrudge]

Yeah, a great deal of that is because you can download a linux ISO that is already mostly up-to-date with patches. With Windows, you're stuck with whatever you have pressed on the CD.

Perhaps you should look up slipstreaming updates into a Windows installation before you speak incorrectly on the topic. Just about all updates and service packs, including hot fixes, can be slipstreamed onto a new install disc much like the current Linux distro's daily/weekly/monthly offerings.

Re:On linux...

[xrayspx]

I gave up and use Konqueror for file management when I know I don't care about launching stuff like videos (it will launch VLC, but it launches a new VLC every time, I'm sure I can fix that, but I don't care). But for previews of directories full of photos, or split-window copying, I just run back to Konq every time.

I wasn't about to pay for a file manager either. Window shading is the same deal. There's WindowShade X, but jeez, why do I need to spend money for this thing really? I've just learned to deal without that.

Re:On linux...

[shmlco]

Actually, the last time I moved from a Powerbook to a MacBook Pro I used Tiger's Migration Assistant. After the copy finished (about 2 hours) almost everything (applications, preferences, backgrounds, altered command keys, control panel changes, accounts, folder layouts, etc.) was there. I had to reinstall Dreamweaver and Photoshop since their registration mechanisms detected the new hardware and "broke", but other than that I was impressed to no end.

Contrast that to the last new Windows machine (XP) I bought, when I had to move everything by hand, reset everything by hand, and spent about a week reinstalling each and every application I used... by hand.

Re:On linux...

[Cervantes]

Perhaps you should look up slipstreaming updates into a Windows installation before you speak incorrectly on the topic. Just about all updates and service packs, including hot fixes, can be slipstreamed onto a new install disc much like the current Linux distro's daily/weekly/monthly offerings. *cough*
*point to 3rd line*
I can have a fully set up and updated XP box inside of 3 hours... 1.5 if I use a slipstream disk.

I know none of us RTFA, but can we at least RTFC? :)

In all seriousness, I was relating to the most standard method of XP installs, which is "put the disc in, install, then do a few hundred megs of updates". When I'm looking for speed in my installs, yeah, I can use a slipstream disk, hell, I'll make a HD image if I'm doing a multi-station rollout.

The parent poster, however, was comparing a freshly-downloaded Linux ISO, which is already patched, with an XP install that required updates to be downloaded, and then complaining about the difference in speed. Yes, it's entirely possible to make an XP install zip right along... slipstream in updates, even program installs and configs, and you can be done in a comparable timeframe to a linux distro. I'm all for fair comparisons. The parent poster, however, wasn't making a fair comparison, and I was pointing out that flaw in his argument.

Re:On linux...

[drachenstern]

The registry had two important goals, consolidating configuration information into one location with an easy storage and retrieval method, and application interopability enhancement.

Ya know why CLSID is such a large part of the registry? It has nothing to do with preventing piracy.

Ya know how CurrentControlSet is so thorough, and how it's off on it's own branch of HKLM? Yeah, if you were to replace all of those values with the correct values for the machine that you were moving to (primarily system driver and hardware reference information) then you could in theory just boot windows back up without ever having a glitch. Theory though, not practice. The theory is sound because MS designed the registry to be modular. It's not their fault that other companies don't respect the sandboxing that MS set up, and it's hard for them to enforce that people play nice, but look at the strides they've made via their IDEs (which is where most people write the said crappy software) and .NET v2.

Most of the problems that people have with drivers or program interoperability stem from those two registry branches anyways, is another good reason why all IT folks should be able to recite the major points of the registry, as well as knowing all the places where windows looks when it goes to start the various functions.

This is one of the few shortcomings I can find with the registry, but it's not the fault of MS as a whole, but rather the failure of different groups to consolidate on one storage location for important settings. Then again, two of the reasons why there were so many different locations where settings may have been in the flat files were for security through obfuscation and because sometimes the maximum size you could read on a flat file could have been exceeded due to the number of settings that you might want, so MS designers purposely chose to store info in multiple places, such as the load differences between system.ini and win.ini.

So I've been going in this direction to come back to, the registry didn't have anything to do with limiting piracy, if anything, it's the reason why so many people want to run Windows, even if they don't want to pay for it. The real thing that seems to be annoying to so many geeks is the oobe libs.

Need I go further?

Re:On linux...

[chris vo]

Linux - tweak for 1-2 hours, spend 4-5 hours downloading packages, 2-3 installing, then the rest of your life telling all your friends "yeah well when _______ comes out of beta it will have the same features. . ."

Re:On linux...

[ivanmarsh]

Oh... thank you very much.

(you forgot to include sarcasm tags in your message)

Re:On linux...

[ArsonSmith]

Yea I've been telling my friend that for years.

"When Vista comes out of beta it will have the same features as my Linux/Xorg box has for the last several years."

Re:On linux...

[zero_offset]

The whole point of the registry is to "make piracy difficult". The ONLY reason they created it in the FIRST place was because Bill Gates et al thought their third-rate operating system was so special and important that to protect it from nasty "pirates" they had to essentially lobotomize it.

LOL ... that's inventive, I'll grant you that.

The correct answer was that the authors of NT realized the ever-expanding and slow-to-process INI arrangement in earlier, simpler versions of Windows was doomed to failure. The registry is a great idea with a really god-awful implementation, and the problems are compounded by a planet full of relatively poor quality programmers that insist on jamming all sorts of weird shit in there in the most unlikely places.

The crackheads who came up with the implementation of COM registration are especially deserving of slow painful deaths. That's 99% of your registry garbage right there.

But it is utterly and absolutely unrelated to piracy. Good luck next time.

Re:On linux...

[naChoZ]

Definitely gotta have my .vimrc too. It's followed me for a long time.

What I do is keep sort of a manifest-slash-backup-script of my important stuff. I never want to backup my entire home dir because directories like ~/.kde can produce some very undesirable results when restoring it. So I just keep a script like:

rsync -av --no-g ~/Documents/ ${DESTROOT}/Documents
rsync -av --no-g ~/.beryl* ${DESTROOT}
rsync -av --no-g ~/.claws-mail ${DESTROOT}
rsync -av --no-g ~/.gaim ${DESTROOT}
rsync -av --no-g ~/.mozilla ${DESTROOT}
rsync -av --no-g ~/.screen* ${DESTROOT}
rsync -av --no-g ~/.tcshrc* ${DESTROOT}
rsync -av --no-g ~/.ssh ${DESTROOT}
rsync -av --no-g ~/.vim* ${DESTROOT}
rsync -av --no-g ~/bin ${DESTROOT}
rsync -av --no-g /etc/apt/sources.list ${DESTROOT}

I just use an nfs or sshfs mount as my destination. So when I restore it, I can just install my core apps and be ready to roll.

I do other things to make my visual tweaks faster. For example, I like to rotate my backgrounds often amongst a collection of wallpapers, so I have a directory ~/Documents/Pictures/Wallpapers/rotate which contains symlinks to my favorite images so I can just go in and select-all in that directory.

I use a combination of google's browser sync (for cookies and such) and yahoo's toolbar (really just for bookmarks) so my browser is instantly usable even if I don't keep my entire ~/.mozilla directory.

Probably a good testimony to how well that works for me is when my laptop hd died a couple of months ago. While the new drive was in transit, I was just booting from the kubuntu cd and running linux from there. I had enough space on the ram disk to install firefox and a couple of the other packages I needed and it worked fairly well.

Re:On linux...

[aputerguy]

Yes... it's "perfect" if you believe in the "command-and-control" method of computing and that everyone will obey the registry laws to the letter as they come down from Lord Gates.

But in reality -- i.e. real life -- companies don't obey it. Registry entries get orphaned, corrupted, misplaced, misused, etc.
I can't tell you the number of programs that I have had trouble removing because of registry issues. Also, every week when my Symantec System Works program runs, it finds hundreds of registry issues that seem to reappear no matter how many times they are corrected or scrubbed. And who can forget the dreaded registry corruption. Change/delete one entry and you can corrupt and lock up your computer with no easy way to recover (unless you backed up your registry recently).

I don't know about you but I am reasonable computer competent and I find the registry very cumbersome and confusing with often hundreds of entries strewn all over the place.

Linux is just sooooo easy. Config files are almost always text files in either /etc (for system-wide) or /home/ for user specific. Each config file is separate and independent. If someone rights a messed-up config program, it doesn't screw up everything else. And with a decent package manager, it is easy to update or delete old config files when programs are updated or deleted respectively. And it doesn't take special programs to read the config files nor does it take minutes to 'search' them -- just a simple, almost instantaneous grep. And good config files are commented so they allow for in-line documentation of various options.

So, yes in theory, one grand, humongous, registry file is "elegant" in some perfect world where everybody rights perfectly Microsoft-compliant code. In reality, the registry is a huge PITA that is infinitely worth then the humbler Unix ascii config file method.

Re:On linux...

[delire]

Living with OS X is closer to a living in a well furnished hotel than a home - pushing a general grand unified field theory of what consititutes 'useability' over user customisation. You can't grow into OS X - in the sense of making yourself at home - so much become good at using it as it is found.

So yes, of course it does have the ""shortest "initial setup time"".

Re:On linux...

[SadGeekHermit]

>>The whole point of the registry is to "make piracy difficult". The ONLY reason
>>they created it in the FIRST place was because Bill
>>Gates et al thought their third-rate operating system was so special and important
>>that to protect it from nasty "pirates" they had
>>to essentially lobotomize it.

>Um, no, not quite

Oh, I disagree.

Consider these related points:

1. All other commercially available operating systems use flat files to store configuration information. And almost every other operating system out there works better than Windows in a variety of ways, not least of which being performance.

2. Operating systems that use flat files to store configuration information are trivially easy to back up. They're also trivially easy to clone and distribute.

3. People who run operating systems that use flat files tend to READ those flat files. The registry, on the other hand, is so huge and byzantine (again, WHY???) that finding entries in it is like going on a fishing expedition. Nobody really knows what's in their registry. I believe this is by design, not by accident.

4. The registry is IN FACT used to make piracy difficult. Virtually every piece of commercial Windows software stores registration information in the registry, usually in literally dozens of different locations so that to clear out a botched install you have to use a search tool and guess at all the possible names the company may have used for its keys. First, do you think Microsoft isn't doing the same thing??? Second, do you think this isn't by design???

5. When a hacker creates a Word Macro Virus and the cops catch him like, a week later, how do you think that happens? Word, installed, puts serial number information in the registry and later, into documents. Again, by design.

6. When they spent millions of dollars building Windows 95 and created long filename support, do you think it was by mistake that they just happened to leave long filename support out of their new version of DOS? Or that you couldn't boot to a command prompt that had long filename support? Again, it was to make piracy difficult. At the time, you couldn't boot to a CD. You had to use a floppy. Live CDs didn't even exist. And there was NO WAY to boot with a floppy and get long filename support. So where before you could use pkzip to zip up your whole windows and dos directory and back up your system to about twenty floppies, with Windows 95 you were basically hosed. Even if you DID zip up all the directories, when you unzipped them during the restore process they'd look like "Progra~1" instead of "Program Files" and you'd be hosed.

IF YOU ARE CORRECT, you must have a reasonable justification for the use of the registry that is credibly better than using a flat-file approach. I bet you don't have one. :)

Re:On linux...

[toadlife]

I mean, how can INI files be doomed when /etc is alive and well after 35 years of growth? They aren't "doomed", but accessing text config files is very slow when they grow to a large size. While there are disadvantages to using a database for config settings, there are certainly disadvantages to using text files too.

And noone ever claimed that parsing /etc/fstab took too much time That's because /etc/fstab is typically only a few lines and typically not read very often. Config files that have the potential to grow to hundreds of lines, and need to be parsed frequently are usually converted into binary form so they can be accessed faster. An example of the top of my head would be the aliases database for postfix, which is written as a text file and then must converted into a binary form for use by postfix. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think gnome also uses a binary format to store configuration settings.

Re:On linux...

[damium]

1. All other commercially available operating systems use flat files to store configuration information. And almost every other operating system out there works better than Windows in a variety of ways, not least of which being performance.

Hmm... OSX would be one to disagree with you there (netinfo is not in flat files and neither is LDAP). OSX does have flat files on the BSD end but they aren't the ones you configure with the gui. The os that used netinfo before OSX was NeXTSTEP and everyone thought it was a bad idea then too. There is also the gconf database that Gnome uses, while similar to the registry in function it uses the file system directories for hierarchy and xml files for storage so it is easy to edit by hand if you need to.

3. People who run operating systems that use flat files tend to READ those flat files. The registry, on the other hand, is so huge and byzantine (again, WHY???) that finding entries in it is like going on a fishing expedition. Nobody really knows what's in their registry. I believe this is by design, not by accident.

Not to knock flat files (I prefer them myself) but one could say the same about finding them. The registry was designed to be a structured database of configuration data, Microsoft just screwed things up badly with it.

4. The registry is IN FACT used to make piracy difficult. Virtually every piece of commercial Windows software stores registration information in the registry, usually in literally dozens of different locations so that to clear out a botched install you have to use a search tool and guess at all the possible names the company may have used for its keys. First, do you think Microsoft isn't doing the same thing??? Second, do you think this isn't by design???

Umm... no. If you look at Microsoft's reference documentation on how companies should and should not use the windows registry I think you will note that the locations where things *should* be stored are quite well defined. Microsoft themselves may have issues with using there own standards but I have never found anti-piracy to be one of their reasons for being incompetent.

5. When a hacker creates a Word Macro Virus and the cops catch him like, a week later, how do you think that happens? Word, installed, puts serial number information in the registry and later, into documents. Again, by design.

Now you are starting to sound paranoid. Can you point out the place in a word document where a serial number is kept? Give me a link or I call BS. I know it is stored in the registry (Where else do you think it would be?) but so are several other bits of license related data. HINT: it is not called an install code, it's called a license key. If you removed the key from the registry it stops working and asks for a key when you start it up.

6. When they spent millions of dollars building Windows 95 and created long filename support, do you think it was by mistake that they just happened to leave long filename support out of their new version of DOS? Or that you couldn't boot to a command prompt that had long filename support?...

IIRC this feature was included in the version of DOS that shipped with Windows 98 so that must not have been their reasoning otherwise they would have left it out.

IF YOU ARE CORRECT, you must have a reasonable justification for the use of the registry that is credibly better than using a flat-file approach. I bet you don't have one. :)

Hmm... I can think of 2 design decisions why a databased approach to configuration has advantages.

• Structured data types in the configuration. (Strings are strings, numbers are numbers, and hey, you can store binary data as well.)
• Standardized API with systematic si

Re:On linux...

[BrokenHalo]

Living with OS X is closer to a living in a well furnished hotel than a home - pushing a general grand unified field theory of what consititutes 'useability' over user customisation. You can't grow into OS X - in the sense of making yourself at home - so much become good at using it as it is found.

Looks like whoever moderated your post as "Troll" happens to be a Mac fanboy.

Your argument, however, is valid. I've been fairly accustomed to setting up my Linux or BSD boxes the way I like them, and from time to time I backtrack and try out other possibilities to see if there happens to be something that might work better.

Whenever I'm working on a Mac, I find it frustrating that the interface just does not allow you to customise it that much. I often have the feeling Apple are saying "You will think outside the box in the way WE tell you to, dammit!".

A case in point is their awful, awful windowing system, which by default will pop up a window of the exact size calculated to show you the least useful amount of whatever you're looking at. So you have to use your mouse/trackpad and click or drag it up to a usable size. And no sir, you may NOT have a hotkey to maximise the window, because that's not how you're supposed to work with OS X...

Re:On linux...

[SadGeekHermit]

God, you're killing me here! Take the knife out, man...

Look, all your objections to using flat files are straw man arguments. If I'm building an application and I want to set up a config file, it's trivially easy to set up an XML file, read it in and parse it. If I'm a halfway decent programmer, I'll be done in half an hour and it'll be perfect. What makes it much better than your registry is that my USERS can edit the file themselves, because I TRUST THEM. See, I'm from New York, not Redmond. A user who just gave me money for something is my brand-new Best Friend. He can do whatever the hell he wants with my project; hell, he can print out the code and roll around naked in it for all I care.

The POINT is, using a registry makes you a pain in the ass. Your user can't just copy your install directory to his new computer. He has to go through your buggy installer. He loses all his settings. And so on.

Using flat files means I'm NOT a pain in the ass. If one of MY users wants to copy my software to a new machine, he can just copy the directory and the config file over. Piece of cake, really.

It's really about being POLITE more than anything else. Don't you think?

Personally

[geek]

Not very long. After years of working with computers (over 20), I've found keeping it simple is best. I change the background, arrange icons how I like and that's about it these days, whether it's windows or OSX or Ubuntu. If the OS can't accommodate this simple style I don't use it.

Re:Personally

[alta]

Ah the icons... First I tell XP not to display anything but a garbage can(trash). It goes on bottom right (thanks apple) Then files that I'm working on get saved to desktop. Files i'm done with go in My Docs (also not displayed) and things that I was working on, and never finished go in a 'drop box' shortcut...

All together, there are only 2 icons that get to call my desktop home, Recycled and dropbox. I'm thinking about remove recycled.

Then I go find a desktop background that's not a corporate endorsement, or a woman, car, sports team. They're usually something abstract... and contrast with the icons rather well... meaning large fields of solid colors. It needs to be something that will span 3 screens. I tried a pic of the kids once, but it was too hard to find the icons against the background.
  The 3rd one on this page has been my favorite for a long time. http://www.9xmedia.com/Pages-products/2000-Backgro unds.html

Re:Personally

[operagost]

All together, there are only 2 icons that get to call my desktop home, Recycled and dropbox. I'm thinking about remove recycled.

I tried a pic of the kids once, but it was too hard to find the icons against the background.

All two of them? I would think muscle memory would be enough in that case.

Weeks.

[strredwolf]

It'll take me a week or two, depending on the distribution, to tweak it to my liking. Some items like KDE I'll just copy over a known good install directory. If it's a system I'm transitioning to, I'll just copy $HOME over and make sure everything's nicely compiled right.

It's never over with

[igotmybfg]

The time I spend tweaking the settings asymptotically approaches something like 5-10% of the time I spend on the PC.

Re:It's never over with

[PurifyYourMind]

Then it would seem not worth it, unless you were seeing over 5-10% of time/comfort savings. Then again, some people just tweak for fun, and it's its own reward. (please mod me up for proper it's/its use!)

Re:It's never over with

[igotmybfg]

Good point. I guess part of it is just that - trying new apps and configs out is fun, and occasionally rewarding. Maybe it does make me 5-10% happier. On average, 7.382%.

The only real shortcut....

[ProppaT]

The only real shortcut is to setup your system how you like it the first time and make a system image so you can restore it if you ever have to nuke your system. The first time is always gonna be time consuming. The only other thing I could see that would shorten the process would be to use MS's system settings transfer option to move settings from your existing box.

Also, how the heck did this one make it through the filters? Who the heck cares how long it takes people to set up their system? Although I will brag that I can assemble a new box in under 10 minutes without troubleshooting.

Norton Ghost?

[CmdrChillupa]

Just tweak it until your happy and then ghost it to a backup drive. When it gets filled with cruft wipe and restore.

Re:Norton Ghost?

[Overzeetop]

That'd be great if nothing every got updated. I actually tried this once and by the time I was ready to start over from scratch I realized it was almost easier to do an actual clean install with current-version apps than try and upgrade everything from 0.4-2.0 versions ago. Now I just keep a directory around with all the commonly installed apps, and when I get an update, I try to remember to put the new install version in the appropriate folder. I've almost given up that for a simple list of apps, and a directory with critical drivers. Things change too fast to have a "stable" image that's good for more than 6 months or so, and with XP running stably for longer than that (my current install is 2.5 years old), the image is just useless.

Let it evolve

[jermz]

When I do the whole burn-down-rebuild on a system, I let it evolve to my tastes. I like a change of scenery now and then, and a new OS install is the right time for me to get that. I try new apps, new desktops, new ideas all around. I might do KDE next time, I might stick with Gnome. I get new icon sets, experiment with new color schemes and wallpapers. It keeps me entertained and I always end up with a usable desktop in the end.

20 minutes

[iusty]

Let's see:
  - copy old /home/username dir
  - "debconf-get-selections" on old computer and pipe to "debconf-set-selections" on new one
  - "dpkg -l |grep ^ii" on old computer and replicate the package list
  - go drink some tea while the apt-get proceeds
  - done!

I carried my home dir with its settings across about three or four new computers in the last eight years or so, and I didn't have to tweak things very much. Only upgrading major components require some maintenance, but other than that, it's simple.

Re:20 minutes

[umeboshi]

For replicating the package list, try this:
  dpkg --get-selections > packages.txt on old machine,
then do:
  dpkg --set-selections packages.txt on new machine,
then do:
  apt-get dselect-upgrade on new machine.

Re:20 minutes

[josephdrivein]

My biggest concern are not the packages, which can be quickly enough downloaded and installed as you described (though I use dpkg --get-selections/--set-selections) but changing the default configs.

That's particularly annoying when the program depends on the particular hw (eg xorg.conf) because I can't copy a config from another box.

Another thing that makes me lose time is downloading the latest stable kernel sources from kernel.org, changing the default config, compiling, installing and troubleshooting the new kernel. I'm always missing something... I use make-kpkg, that helps compiling installing and archiving my pre-compiled kernel packages. I'm not sure it's a good choice, from the security point of view, not to use the debian kenel, but I often need something that's stable enogh only in newer kernels.

Installing the packages takes just 20min, but adding up the rest, it takes me from 2 to 3 hours usually to finish, depending on what the box runs.

Home

[voice_of_all_reason]

That's the clincher. About a week, simply because I don't do it that often (once every 3-4 years) that I don't have a list

Classic-ize windows display settings
Give the system an enema (remove all the windows default crap, any ads or OEM-given crap)
Install the necessities (ad-aware, avg, firefox, powertools, other windows registry hax)
Install a few benchmark things and test (diablo 2, doom, zsnes, media player classic + fddshow)

Dump data from old backup. (Over my last 3 installs this was via diskettes, then CDrs, then DVDrs). Then over the next week I'll just install new stuff as needed. Winamp, AIM, mud client -- I save all these executables but by the time you do a reinstall they're outdated anyway.

Depends on how cute she is, or how drunk I am..

[stratjakt]

ask your mom, she'd know better than me

badump ching

3 days

[fistfullast33l]

I use gentoo, and because I'm sadistic I love the install process. The acutal gentoo install is about two hours I think now that they've eliminated stage 1 and 2. But I like to compile everything from sources after that so it takes me another day (not straight through, I usually do it while I'm at work) to compile open office, firefox, x.org, and the like. Then it takes me another day or so to make sure my laptop can handle things like ACPI (I always forget to compile it for some reason), 3D acceleration (stupid ATI drivers), suspend-resume, framebuffer, E17, gensplash, and whatever else takes a bit of time. I don't mind it because I like the feeling of starting fresh without all those packages that you use once and never again being installed.

Re:3 days

[tygt]

I use gentoo, and because I'm sadistic I love the install process

Not having used Gentoo, I may be wrong here, but I think that the word you're looking for is masochistic.

Of course, unless you're inflicting pain on the penguin, but given my own installation experience I think you're the one getting the pain... and apparently enjoying it.

OS X Plus Firewire

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

You boot the old computer in Firewire mode by holding down a key. You plug in a firewire cable to the new computer. You click the install from old computer button. You go get some coffee and a bagel.

So basically, it takes me about 60 seconds and it takes the computer an hour or so. That includes pulling over my Windows and Linux desktop installs within a VM. Seriously, this is one of the main reasons OS X is my base workstation OS instead of Linux. Who wants to waste a bunch of time manually copying things over, only to find not all of it works anyway and you still have to reinstall a few things and tweak a few more?

Re:OS X Plus Firewire

[jimbo]

Yes!!

This is on of the reasons I changed to Macs after 8 years on SuSE Linux. It being a BSD of sorts also helped my decision :-)

When I replaced the iMacG5 with a MacBook Pro I did as you mentioned and everything was exactly the same, down to the position of the files on my desktop and all settings, installed apps, etc. etc. It was pure paradise.

Only difference was that I made a latte with a splosh of whiskey and some brown sugar instead of coffee+bagel.

Re:OS X Plus Firewire

[Frumious Wombat]

The only thing it didn't grab on mine was the NFS settings in NetInfo. Everything else just quietly wandered from the G5 to the x86 without my involvement, and the only difference I noticed was that I'd bought a larger external monitor, rather than a 17" iMac. It even caught my OpenDirectory setup.

You can go one better; just clone your one standard machine, and save the disk image. That way if you have two machines (laptop and desktop, for instance, or loaner while one's in the shop), you can just put the new machine in target disk mode, and do an ASR restore. Probably only worth the effort if you're running a lab or office worth of machines, but still pretty cool, as you can set various values to be configured on a per-machine basis while the rest is just duped straight across.

The best part is that it works like it should; the computer works, and I go off and think somewhere.

And for you Unix guys going, "and.....", it didn't even involve pulling the old system disk and using an intermediate system to dd it across. It Just Works. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go find my black turtleneck and attend the Cult's weekly meeting.

Re:OS X Plus Firewire

[Brome]

Same for me.
Each time I get a new mac, it takes only an hour or two to let the machine copy every application, account and preference from my old mac to the new one. And sure enough, I instantly feel at home on the new machine, except with more power under the hood.

And if I'm too excited to wait for as long as one hour, I can simply boot from my external firewire drive, which is a regularly updated backup of my main HD.

Two years . . .

[nixman99]

. . . and counting.

Windows Update

[Hijacked Public]

It has probably been mentioned and I just skipped it, but just the process of securing a Windows reinstall can take days, unless you have the time to babysit the whole thing.

I have reinstalled XP a few times, from an SP1 disc. Visit Windows Update. It can't Update until I install some ActiveX stuff so I can use the latest version of the site. That done, it recommends maybe 50 or 60 updates. Reboot. Go back to the site, spend a half hour downloading SP2 and another 2 installing it. Reboot. Go back to the site. More updates, maybe only a dozen this time. Reboot. IE7. Reboot. Patch for IE7. Possibly a couple of driver updates. Reboot.

And if you leave to go to the store without accepting the EULA for the patch....more wasted time. And this whole process is just to secure the machine, no app install of setup or tweaking.

Vista seems slightly better in this regard as it can download updates during the install process, but it still isn't up to the level that most Linux distros are.

I don't even know what the OSX install process looks like, or if there even is one. And I own more Macs than anything else.

Re:Windows Update

[ewhac]

I have reinstalled XP a few times, from an SP1 disc. Visit Windows Update. It can't Update until I install some ActiveX stuff so I can use the latest version of the site. That done, it recommends maybe 50 or 60 updates. Reboot. Go back to the site, spend a half hour downloading SP2 and another 2 installing it.

No no. Download the SP2 update on another machine and burn it on to a CD.

Yank the network cable. Install XP from your install media (SP1). Insert SP2 disc and run the update from there. You are now (relatively) safe from network attack -- even better if you're behind NAT. Crank up the Windows firewall to "fsck off, dickweed!" plug in the network cable and visit Windows Update.

By installing SP2 first, you save yourself the trouble of downloading/installing fixes from Windows Update that SP2 already has.

Schwab

Re:Windows Update

[The One and Only]

I don't even know what the OSX install process looks like, or if there even is one. And I own more Macs than anything else.

Well, one thing they do to avoid being complete pricks is roll all the security updates and bug fixes into the latest point upgrade so you only download that instead of every single update since 2001. If you connect Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.0 to Software Update, you're going to get a Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.9 update, probably an AirPort and Quicktime update, an iTunes update, and updates for whatever Apple apps you have installed.

Re:No time at all....

[GrayCalx]

I'm a Linux user, so the process is simple:

Heheh, I love this comment because it is so indicative of the "my OS is better than your OS" that, unfortunately, a small number of Linux users suffer from. Let me restate his build with mine using windows...
his...
1 - install new version of favorite distro (currently Ubuntu)
2 - use package manager to install any additional apps
3 - Use and enjoy!

mine...
1 - Install new version of current stable windows version (right now msce)
2 - Install all additional apps from my backup/media storage drive
3 - use and enjoy!

Hehe, just awesome... the ignorance... the egotism. Like windows users are suffering at home in a brightly lit office, sweat pouring down our face. Constantly on hold with a Dell representative (because we only use Dells of course) begging the operator to explain to us why our computer came with a cup-holder and not the DVD-RW we paid for!!! Oh noes!!!

Karma profit!

[BecomingLumberg]

1. Wait for someone to make a joke at Linux's expense 2. Blast 'em! 3. Completely ignore your sense of humor's pleading, from inside the locked closet, that it is a joke. 4. ... 5. Karma!

On Windows

[ewhac]

I've done this a couple of times recently -- once for my new machine, and once for a friend of mine whose machine got pwn3d. My checklist works roughly like this:

• Perform an inventory of the hardware in the machine. Note especially the vendor and model number of the major components. You'll need this later.
• Establish partitions on the boot drive (only if I'm dual-booting Linux or BeOS or something).
• Yank network cable.
• Install Windows from installation media. This takes a ridiculous amount of time, considering that most of the work is (should be) simply copying files. Reboot.
• Install Service Pack 2, which I conveniently have on a separate CD I burned. Reboot.
• Crank up Windows firewall to highest setting, or moral equivalent thereof (I'm behind a NAT router, so that works).
• Visit Windows Update, and download all security and bug fixes. Duration depends on connection speed, but it can easily consume an hour. Reboot.
• Using the hardware inventory you prepared earlier: for $item in $inventory ; do
  • Visit hardware vendor's site.
  • Locate, download, and install latest device driver(s) for $item.
  • Reboot.
• done

At this point, you have a usable machine. If it's my machine (and even if it isn't my machine), I usually install the following software:

• Firefox
• Vim
• VirtuaWin
• TreeSize
• PuTTY
• WinSCP
• TweakUI

Schwab

Still...

[AJWM]

I'm still tweaking my Commodore 64. I'll get back to you...

One to two weeks...

[Anonymous Coward]

depending on how much money I spend on her.

About 15 seconds

[Ark]

svn checkout http://my.dotfiles.home/dotfiles dotfiles
cd dotfiles
make

Re:Not long.

[linvir]

Change mouse behaviour to "Focus follows mouse"

So you're the degenerate pervert using this. Damn you! Damn you to hell!

Mounted Home

[Bent Mind]

I cheat. /home is auto-mounted from a NFS server. Short of telling the box to grab the automount map from LDAP, I don't need to set up any personalization. It's already there. A new box is just new hardware. I do have different application sets depending on the hardware capabilities. However, that doesn't have anything to do with personalizing the system. Rather, it has to do with why the box was built.

Forever. EV. VER.

[smellsofbikes]

There are people who stop setting up their systems? Really? That's cool. I never even get the case put back on mine, much less stop adjusting and installing and tweaking.
(That's a big benefit of a laptop: it's not always sitting around with the sides off and wires streaming out to nearby electronics, coz I can't *do* that with a laptop. I'm definitely the computer equivalent of the guy in high school who never had the hood on his car. He had the coolest car... but he was also the only person who *needed* the fire extinguisher under the passenger's seat.)

Re:Not long.

[Bluesman]

Focus follows mouse (without auto-raise) is the only way to read one window while typing in another, without the window you're typing in raising to the foreground and obscuring the window you're reading from.

For laptops or any non-multi screen system it's the only way to go.

When I'm using windows it's the biggest thing I miss. There's a power tool that allows you to set it up, but many windows apps behave badly without the click to focus behavior.

Re:On a Mac: 4 hours...

[kwerle]

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en& q=osx+subversion&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

1st hit:
http://metissian.com/projects/macosx/subversion/

Nice installer:
http://metissian.com/downloads/macosx/subversion/s ubversion-client-1.3.1.dmg

Vista

[Thabenksta]

Vista is the first operating system that I've been happy with out of the box. I still have the default background and theme. The only personalization I did was add some gadgets to the side bar, and make the desktop icons bigger.

As far as my development environment goes, that seems to change every week anyway, so...

not too long ... linux user

[SCHecklerX]

Home Servers: a little longer because I have so much damned 1-off stuff on them. I guess the same goes for the enterprise ones.

Desktops: not much more than 'cd /home && tar -zxvf username.tgz' after doing the install. A couple of other minor tweaks in the init scripts (I've yet to find a distro that does everything exactly the way I like) is usually in order too.

It's supposed to end?

[hackshack]

It depends on what you consider a 'tweak.'

My 'defaults' for a new system: rip the keys off and change them to Dvorak, install gcc + build tools, create RSA keys for ssh, certificates for wireless, setup rsync script for backup, install X11, install VNC + rdesktop clients, setting terminal to default to 'screen' for multiple tty goodness. And that's just for the girlfriend.

I'd owned my PowerBook for maybe 3 years when I discovered Quicksilver. That kept me busy for a while. Then I started wrapping shell scripts into apps with Platypus, and launching them with Quicksilver. Installed TypeIt4Me to make notes easier. About a year ago I started doing much of my work in the command line. 4 years later, I'm still 'tweaking' the system, wringing out as much efficiency as possible. Given what I do on it (sys admin), the limiting factor is not the CPU, but file manipulation, batching, networking, etc. and those can be tweaked as long as I'm willing to learn new things.

Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.

With or without the trial of Norton Antivirus...?

[Joce640k]

"Windows - Tweaks for about 4-6 hours"

Is that with or without the trial of Norton Antivirus on the disk...?

Not long

[SilentUrbanFox]

20 minutes to install Ubuntu, maybe 30 minutes to dupe all my home directory stuff over, and 20 minutes to install packages from a honking apt-get line. Though that last bit doesn't count, I can still continue to work while that's going on.