The 2nd journey begins… Mandriva 2006 upgrade 2 – Part 10
I think it’s time to wrap things up. The KDE start new session option is back after the changes I mentioned to the /etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc file I mentioned in a previous post. There are no outstanding issues from the upgrade. (I need to adjust the font sizes down a bit, but that’s not a big deal.) This series, of course, has been spread out over days. The actual event covered two afternoon’s/evening’s. The first day was the attempted urpmi upgrade (which didn’t go too well.)
Followed by the boot disc installer upgrade which went fairly well all things considered. After that, there were a few things that took personal attention to get working, win4lin (install win4lin kernel modules from a club urpmi source), nvidia (install nvidia driver direct from nvidia.com), kqemu (uninstall rpm I had previously made and rebuild source rpm), start new session missing (/etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc change), allow mysqld to listen for tcp connections (/etc/sysconfig/mysqld edit), the tricky one was the missing menu entries (move contents of .menu in home directory and update-menus -vn), and tvcard settings (remember/find old modprobe settings – card=10 tuner=2).
Was it a tough upgrade. In some ways it was not the user-friendliest of situations. It wasn’t the worst upgrade I’ve ever seen (Windows or linux)… I would hate to think what I would have had to go through with a Windows upgrade/install in searching out drivers for everything. I’m not sure if/where I have drivers for the tvcard and would likely have needed to open the case and pull it out. Realistically, I have an eclectic system… and try to do more with it (probably) than I should. (2 sound cards, 3d accelerated video, tv capture, mythbackend, 2 hard drives, dvd rw, gigabit network, on the software side several virtualization environments (win4lin/qemu), database server/internal web/mythtv server/full desktop/etc…)
The smoothes upgrade route will probably be to make sure your data is in a seperate partition, backup any config files you care about and go for a fresh install rather than an upgrade. Even then I see people running into possible problems with old settings files in their home directories. I found it useful to create a brand new user for the purpose of troubleshooting. Anyway, I learned (or refreshed my memory) on where a few useful things are set under Mandriva which is a useful thing.
Hopefully some of the turns along the way have been of use for anyone stumbling across these posts. Admittedly I archive it here not just for the world, but myself. It’s kind of ironic, but I did a search on one of the points I’ve mentioned and found an article from my site in the top few search results. (Oh yeah, I guess I’ve done that…)…