Monday, November 09, 2009

Upgrading to mandriva 2010

I spent a bit of time this weekend upgrading two machines from Mandriva 2009.1 to 2010. Just a few comments and pointers which might be helpful to others.
I started with a machine which is a little lacking in memory (just 256meg), I initially tried an upgrade from DVD but that crashed before getting to the 'do you want to upgrade' question, I assume this was because of the lack of memory. As I wasn't certain whether it was a DVD problem, I mounted the original downloaded ISO image and put the 4gig of rpm files into /var/cache/urpmi/rpms just to avoid having to download them all again. I then attempted to follow the procedure outlined here though I used the command
urpmi --wget --no-verify-rpm --auto-select -v --allow-force that page is a little confusing as to which options to use. This stopped after only upgrading a few packages and I found I had to do a urpmi kernel and then a repeat of the first urpmi --wget --no-verify-rpm --auto-select -v --allow-force to get the upgrade to really start. It went pretty smoothly considering the low power of the machine, I just had to confirm that certain packages really should be upgraded (maybe I should have used the --force option but it's good to know what is being forced!). Upgrade finished, that machine runs kde4 if a little slowly. With fluxbox as a window manager it is very responsive!
Then onto the mailserver (and my main home machine), the upgrade DVD booted without problems and I just set the upgrade going, went to bed, found it had finished next morning and completed the upgrade with a reboot - very, very straightforward. The only two issues so far have been:
  • the loss of the nvidia driver - post upgrade it was using the nv driver which is a little slow for 3D/crack-attack/googleearth, I'd forgotten how to re-install this - go to 'configure your computer' view the hardware, select graphic card and 'configure' and the appropriate (non-open) driver will be downloaded and installed.
  • The other problem has been with sound and amarok, I also like to use fluxbox on this machine, but sound wouldn't work until I logged in with KDE4 as the environment, amarok now works in fluxbox but the sound is choppy (which it isn't with the KDE4 environment. I've turned off pulseaudio but presumably there's something within the kde environment which I need to start manually in fluxbox, but, so far, I've not found it!

Here's the inevitable screen shot of the desktop

Oh, and another thing, mandriva doesn't appear to have an rpm for MyPasswordSafe which I've used for quite a few years to keep all my passwords including the one for kwallet (kde's password system which some applications insist on using), I have a copy of MyPasswordSafe in /usr/local/bin which runs fine in fluxbox but falls over with kde4 which is a bit of a problem!! The code off the app website won't build on this system claiming that ui file is too old (pre KDE 3.3) - but the latest version of Ubuntu has a working MyPasswordSafe in its repository, maybe I need to find Ubuntu's source for this?
Oops, forgot to add the summary that 2010 is, in my experience, far more responsive than 2009.1 everything just feels faster (and that's even if I'm running with KDE!)

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