Questions about a move from 2005LE to 2006

Printable View

10-08-2005
sabin

Questions about a move from 2005LE to 2006

Hiya folks !

I'm a happy user of my Mandriva 2005LE, even though there are a few minor things that bug me, including mainly KDE elements missing stability, etcetera, etcetera, in other words i'm diying to install a Mandriva 2006 as soon as it will be available for non-paying people :)

However, I installed plenty of things, and now I only have 500 megabytes free in my / partition.
(/home and swap are in another partition)

Thus, I don't know if I can install Mandriva 2006 over 2005, using the "update" (or whatever you'll call it) function.

What I wonder is :
- will the update overwrite previous files, or
- will the update add newer version of the files without deleting the previous version files, just disabling their use ?

(nearly all of my programs are installed from RPM source, not compiled)

If it's an overwriting, I guess I can install 2006 over 2005, considering KDE+Gnome+MDV programs will be overwritten, and I will still have 500 megabytes of free space.
If it's an addition of files, I'm pretty sure that 500 megabytes won't be enough then :wink: ... And then I will have to format my / partition and make a clean install :-/

Thanks if you can reply to me ^^

(BTW : in case of a clean install after a format of /, do you know if I can let
the /home partition intact, and should MDV2006 recognize my user profile and accept to use it ? Or should I fear that the /home folders will be deleted ?)
10-09-2005
fingal

Hi Sabin (I like your avatar by the way),

That's quite a complex set of questions. I think it's a bit like asking "How long is a piece of string?" You might assume that if you upgrade to version 2006 you'll get more stability and functionality. I've found that - with Mandriva at least - this might not happen. When I upgraded to LE 2005 from Mandrake Official Release I actually had more bugs, less stability and a slower boot time. It would be better to wait until Mandriva 2007 (or whatever they will call it). Any longer than that and you might as well do a fresh install.

A good idea would be to install updates to 2005 from the Mandriva website. You'll learn a lot that way, and I must admit that this is what I'm doing (or trying to ... I have a few problems). The challenge is really to get a nice stable version of 2005 ... Mandriva have got bug fixes, security fixes and package updates for this distro.

You can't really say how much more room a new version will take up, but I think distros tend to get bigger over time. As people use bigger hard drives, developers fill the space with bloat. Sorry, cool software. :lol:

If you have /home on a separate partition that's great, but if you try to re-format / leaving /home intact and then reinstall I don't think that approach will work. If you have any spare room in /home you might consider re-sizing your / and /home partitions with QTParted. If you have a Knoppix live cd you could boot from that, log in as root and start QTParted, but before doing any of this please back up your files. Always give yourself an escape route. :wink:
10-09-2005
sabin

It's hard to tell if MDV2006 will be larger than MDV2005LE... but let's say they are the same size, about 2 Gigabytes (I don't know, "let's say" ^^)...
If I upgrade a MDV2005LE into a MDV2006, should that add 2 new gigabytes to my / partition, or should that leave unchanged the free space ? Now you must see what I mean by "adding or replacing" ^^

And before my install, it's sure I'll do every possible backup, i'm not subject to suicidal tendencies ^^
10-10-2005
fingal

Quote:

Originally Posted by sabin

It's hard to tell if MDV2006 will be larger than MDV2005LE... but let's say they are the same size, about 2 Gigabytes (I don't know, "let's say" ^^)...
If I upgrade a MDV2005LE into a MDV2006, should that add 2 new gigabytes to my / partition, or should that leave unchanged the free space ? Now you must see what I mean by "adding or replacing" ^^

And before my install, it's sure I'll do every possible backup, i'm not subject to suicidal tendencies ^^

I'm reasonably sure that 2006 won't add another 2 Gig to /. It's likely to overwrite a certain number of files and add a few more here and there, but I suspect that it will increase the size of / to a certain extent.

It's hard to predict though, because it's in the hands of the developers. You might consider uninstalling any packages you don't really use to save room. I should do the same!
10-10-2005
sabin

I gave it a try, finally... and guess what ? I have 1.4 Go free on / now o_O

OK, KDE got screwed up and i'll have to remove nvidia "drivers" (from RPM) too, but well, that worked ! ^^
10-10-2005
fingal

Quote:

Originally Posted by sabin

I gave it a try, finally... and guess what ? I have 1.4 Go free on / now o_O

OK, KDE got screwed up and i'll have to remove nvidia "drivers" (from RPM) too, but well, that worked ! ^^

Hey, something worked out ... more or less :wink:
10-15-2005
sabin

Just a bit more information, because I wouldn't want to scare people who want to switch to 10.1 (mandriva 2005 LE) to 10.2 (MDV2006) :D

- concerning KDE :
Actually, I chose to keep the same username, so the new KDE 3.4 (packed with 10.2) found my 3.3.2 /.kde/ folder.
And all my settings for the previous KDE couldn't be loaded... for instance, my theme was Galaxy : Galaxy wasn't available (not even proposed) for the 3.4. And so on, and so on, even the mouse pointers I had with 3.3 were nowhere to be seen.
Yet most other elements were kept, such as the organization of my desktop, my choice of wallpapers, etcetera.

- concerning Nvidia :
I had had a bug with my Mandriva 2005 LE. The nvidia drivers were not installed during the initial installation and MDV only could run in graphical mode ("startx" wouldn't change anything), and the only solution would be to make an update-installation, chose again my monitor and again my video card.
As a result, booting with graphical interface worked finally, but there had been a glitch in the services with a few DKMS and nvidia stuff not loaded but yet available to load if I wanted (but if I wanted, graphical interface wouldn't load :?
)
I tried 3 or 4 times the installation process for that 2005 LE on a freshly formatted drive, but that problem occured every time, poor GeForce4 Ti 4200 of mine, scorned by Mandriva ^^
This inheritance might have explained why the 2006 installer thought nvidia to work already fine, and didn't install its own fine-working preinstalled drivers... Well, after a fresh format of / the nvidia drivers worked way better, so it must have been why !