The 2nd journey begins… Mandriva 2006 upgrade 2 – Part 5
Well, where are things? The gui installer did a good job, got the system up and running. The biggest initial problem is that it didn’t change the default boot entry in lilo, which meant the system tried to boot under the old kernel and things died (likely c++ incompatibilities?) So, on a REBOOT, I chose linux which I assumed pointed to the new kernel and everything went fine, booted to the gui login. The network upgrade took a while (several hours) to pull in 1400 or so packages.
But that’s probably a fairly good experience for all the stuff I’ve got installed.
I’m at a point where most everything I NEED works well. Mail/web/office suite/win4lin are all there and all work. There are a few problems though. Some are fairly perplexing… First up is the NVidia driver isn’t working correctly (failed to load GLX). So I suspect conflict with leftovers from the past install. I will try to address that by uninstalling all nvidia related stuff and reinstalling. Until then I’m acceleration-less.
Kqemu will need to be recompiled for the new kernel – no surprise. Win4lin kernel module installed with no problems. Some of the strangest posers are within KDE. I’m missing the “system” menu for configuration. I thought moving the .kde folder would solve this (as a new user seems to have all menus with no trouble.) So, I renamed .kde to .kdeold (to save configuration so I could copy back over). When I logged in, I’d lost the configuration data (expected), but still had the old menu problems. (Including the following when running kcontrol.)
QSettings::sync: filename is null/empty
kcontrol: WARNING: No K menu group with X-KDE-BaseGroup=settings found ! Defaulting to Settings/
Followed by an empty kde control center. I’ve wondered if some of my old kiosk settings could be a problem (I had used Kiosk to do a restricted gui for my 4 year old.) But, I don’t see evidence that’s the case. I moved .kdeold back to .kde and left that to tackle soon.
Also the tv tuner settings are wrong (my card has never been supported correctly.)
To be honest. I did take the opportunity to boot up a kubuntu boot disk and consider the possibility of changing distros. There are a few things about ubuntu I’d have to get used to though. I do see some good things (very responsive desktop from the livecd.) Kynaptic seems a better gui package manager than gurpmi…. I’m still more familiar (and more fond) of urpmi than apt-get… plus there are a few other questions that would prevent me from making such a disruptive change when I’ve got merely 3 things that weren’t quite there.
In all fairness, kubuntu made the same (wrong) decisions on my tv card as mandriva. So, it’s just a matter of finding how it was configured before. Still, for a new user I can see kubuntu as a great choice. (I was trying 5.04 – downloaded 5.10 to try as well.) I wonder how well kubuntu upgrades tend to go?
No, I’m not changing loyalties, but kubuntu looks like a very well done debian based distro and might be worth a second look when I can.