The 2nd journey begins… Mandriva 2006 upgrade 2 – Part 1
I’m writing this from the laptop. Having run Mandriva 2006 without any real significant bumps for a couple weeks I’ve come to a point where I’m ready to take the plunge on the desktop. The desktop is my primary workstation. The laptop get’s occasional light use and is the one I’m more likely to play with when it comes to possibly losing configuration information or scripts (because I’ve got things copied to the desktop and server.)
Today I was supposed to be at jury duty and so had cleared the slate for the day and discovered last night that I would be excused. I certainly didn’t expect that. It’s been a fairly quiet day though and although it looks like an ice storm is bearing down, I thought it might be a good opportunity to plunge ahead with an upgrade.
This is a common sense tip. Save software upgrades for times that you don’t feel like you have to rush. If most of your work is in the week, a weekend might be a good time for a change to “business critical” software. In other words plan for things to take longer than you expect and go worse than you expect and then hopefully you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Since this upgrade is on the desktop, the primary workstation, I’m going to be more careful beforehand. I’ve spent the last little while copying a few specific areas over to a USB drive “just in case”. Among those, /etc /root (for any scripts I’ve put in root’s home), my $USER/.kde directory (KDE applications save configuration and other settings in this tree…), my .evolution folder and my documents folder.
That’s certainly not EVERYTHING, but it covers the things that would be MOST disruptive if something went wrong. I do have backups of the other areas, but they are older. Of course, the other areas don’t see as much change. Also, the other areas are likely filled with things that could be easily replaced. (A livecd build tree for instance, or mp3 downloads from an online news source. (scripted)).
I do think for this upgrade I’m going to go a different route than last time. On the laptop it was the bootcd install/upgrade. This time I think I’ll do an upgrade through URPMI. We’ll see if we get to a point where I have to resort to the boot cd, but I’ve gone that route before. Frankly I’ve got so much various stuff on the desktop it wouldn’t hurt me to sort out what I NEED from what I’ve accumulated and install from scratch, but not today…