I found this How-to --> http://www.howtoforge.com/upgrading-from-m...sktop-to-2008.1

Has anyone tried it? If yes, with what results? caveats???

I have several servers running on my 2008 system. I have backed up the config files to my home directroy. I don't want to format if I don't have to. I'm not sure what to backup for cups. If I upgrade, will I have to reconfigure ethernet?

I have burned the 2008.1 CD, it boots fine, everything I tried worked as expected.

I usually format and install a clean install. It then takes me a week or so to get everything working again. That is what I'm trying to avoid.

I would appreciate your thoughts.

I upgraded many times w/o problems but your mileage may very. Be aware though to do it online and not use the installer because there is a bug in the mandriva installer on free/powerpack that will hang the upgrade process.



I useally run etc-update after the update to update/merge (or keep existing files) config files but look at what you are replacing (I know /etc/fstab will be replaced with a blank fstab file)

I have also done this many times in the past, and each time it worked out well. I will say that you're much better off upgrading from stable to stable than trying to go stable to cooker (when the development cycle for the next release starts, things can get really messed up) or from cooker to stable (might be some glaring conflicts), though it is possible.



Never thought to run etc-update (I do it all the time in gentoo, never thought to do it in Mandriva, or I didn't know enough about it at the time), but I have never had an upgrade replace my fstab file. Maybe something has changed since the last time I ran Mandriva.

The upgrade didn't replace it, it just created a new file called fstab.rpmnew, like it does with all config files. In rpmdrake you are presented with the differences between the files and can merge/select old or new file but not with uprmi. But I prefer upgrading with urpmi because you can leave it unattended in rpmdrake you have to make a selection to continue.

I would recommend if you are upgrading from one release to the next that you do so with urpmi rather than rpmdrake.

I've also always done it from outside of X to be on the safe side.

I followed the link in the first post, followed the instructions, and I'm happy to report, everything worked well enough. It took about three hours to complete the upgrade. There were a few packages I had to make selections for, from a list. Other than the consumed time, this was a very easy way to upgrade one level; 2008 to 2008.1.

Grub was updated with the "Spring" boot option. Fstab was not disturbed. So the basics are all there. I will do some more testing, and report what I find.

It has taken some time to sort out all the minor problems.

The biggest one was the proprietary nvidia driver was installed, but would not install. I don't know why, what I did to get it going, was uninstall with urpmi, and then re-install. I could then get the nvidia driver to load and run. Compiz won't start, you can't enable it with out the nvidia driver. I had to use XFdrake, select the card, quit, and follow the prompt to install the nvidia driver. All is good with Compiz, and Nvidia now.

All my servers are running, and didn't require any tweaking. That includes Cups, Samba, NFS and SSH. This was the biggest benefit of installing from the repos. A clean install takes me several days of configuring to get things back to normal.

Hope this helps anyone considering an upgrade from the repos...

yeah I forgot distrib-coffee is busy and slow nowadays max 130-140kB/s but it is the most up-to-date mirror; proxad is quite fast (850-900kB/s) and up-to-date and so are most other french mirrors, nluug in Holland is a good one too