Mandriva 2007 Spring Free upgrade - Bad Idea

[Guest mikejd]

I have just upgraded to Mandriva 2007 Spring Free from Mandriva 2006 using a DVD from Linux Format issue 94. I have to ask myself the question - Why do I do this? Every time I have ever tried to upgrade Mandrake/Mandriva things go wrong.

 

I have been using Mandrake/Mandriva since version 7.2 and every time I have upgraded rather than done a new install things which were working now don't. It must be time to ditch Mandriva and try another distro, I'm just concerned that this could be worse as group IDs and things like that are often different and I don't want to risk not being able to access old data.

 

This time the first problem was that I couldn't use the DVD or CD drives - I had to go into the Control Centre and re-configure. Not too difficult you would think except that I can't access the Mandriva Control Centre while logged in as myself. My desktop link now fails for an unspecified reason; in a terminal shell 'su' doesn't work - it immediately says 'wrong password' without even requesting one. 'Sudo' doesn't recognise my root password. I have to log out as me and log in again as root to access the Control Centre, so this applies to anything like software and hardware management. Rather inconvenient.

 

Next I can't print. The printer worked perfectly before, now I had to try deleting and reinstalling the printer 3 times before it eventually worked.

 

Open Office - my desktop links again don't work. Now I have to find where the files are installed and change the links. Not too onerous but I now have three complete versions of Open Office because each time I upgrade to a new Mandriva version it installs Ooo in a different place in the file system and I don't like to uninstall in case any of the files might be required for the new version.

 

Opera - my browser of choice - now hangs up for minutes at a time. It can't even connect to Google at all. It seems to have trouble finding URLs. Firefox connects immediately, so it's nothing to do with my broadband connection.

 

And this was just in the first hour after upgrading, God knows what else I'm going to find.

 

Please excuse the rant, I know this is not an official site. But I don't know where else to post, I don't think there is anywhere on the official Mandriva site unless you are a registered customer who bought the software.

 

Has anyone else had similar experience?

 

Mike Davies

Edited June 27, 2007 by mikejd

[adamw]

2006 to 2007 Spring is a three version update. As I've posted to another thread, updating that far is always dodgy. We do our best, but too much stuff changes in the Linux infrastructure in a year and half to make it possible to make this kind of upgrade trouble-free.

 

I'd _really_ recommend going with a clean install, it will work far better. You can preserve your /home partition to save your documents and settings.

 

The official forums are open to all - http://forum.club.mandriva.com/ .

[{BBI}Nexus{BBI}]

To resolve your su issue, execute the following as root:

 

cp -vf /etc/pam.d/su /etc/pam.d/su_bak;cp -vf /etc/pam.d/su.rpmnew /etc/pam.d/su

[AussieJohn]

I can understand your disappointment but the way I see it you have two things working against you.

 

1. Is the point made by Adam. To think you can do an upgrade across 2006 straight to 2007 Spring without having difficulties is really expecting too much.

2. A lot of the magazine supplied install discs are suspect in quality.

The suppliers do NOT supply Mandriva (or any other Linux OS) without meddling with it first for reasons of their own.

This could also be part of Windows influence and strategy to ensure that newbies trying to get away from windows do not have a happy experience.

Remember that the Magazines make money from Windows but practically none, if any, from Linux.

 

You are advised to always get your Linux OS from the OS vendor (eg., Mandriva) directly as discs, or from on line download from them or their mirrors, or ask someone to burn you a copy.

If you have difficulty with all three options then send me an email by PM ing me and I will post you a copy free no matter where you live (post free).

 

I have said it many times and it still holds true..........If you can't do a successful install of Mandriva it is unlikely you will do any better using another Linux OS under the same circumstances, although not impossible.

 

Years ago when I first started using Mandrake, I followed the recommendation of those times to always do a fresh install and make it easy by creating a separate /home partition first.

I have done so ever since, even though upgrading from just previous version has now become pretty good, and have never regretted doing it that way.

 

You could also consider it good housekeeping, namely cleaning out unneeded files and folders no longer needed by the newer version but which would still be left in place and just occupying space if you just did an upgrade.

With an upgrade, stuff not needed by the upgrade in NOT automatically deleted by the upgrade.

 

 

Cheers. John.

[ianw1974]

Chances are a lot of config files needed migrating. Easy way is:

 

updatedb
slocate rpmnew

 

then you replace the respective config files with the rpmnew to get yourself right. Hot tip I've always remembered for the last two years from adamw!!!

 

Alternatively, you can install a package called etc-update and use this to do it for you.

 

You could upgrade 2006 without problems, but most of it will be config file related. The one I mentioned above, and everything that is in your config files in your home directory as well. 2006 was KDE 3.4, whereas 2007 and higher is 3.5.x. Config files are normally supposed to be updated during an upgrade, but this isn't always guaranteed. For, example, what I tend to do is:

 

mv /home/ian /home/ian.old

 

then recreate your home directory:

 

mkdir /home/ian
chown ian:ian /home/ian

 

now you have an empty home directory. Upgrade your system, and then move back your normal folders from /home/ian.old. Then do:

 

cp /etc/skel/.* /home/ian/

 

that gets your bash stuff back. Then start setting up KDE/Gnome how you liked it looking before, and go for gold. If you have emails you need to keep from Thunderbird, then:

 

mv /home/ian.old/.thunderbird /home/ian/

 

or even your old Firefox stuff:

 

mv /home/ian.old/.mozilla /home/ian/

 

you have to do all of this before launching Thunderbird or Mozilla, else it'll create a new profile directory.