I blew up my desktop last night

[mark9117]

This isn't really news. I've done it before and will surely do it again. And thank goodness I do, or I might never get a fresh install. Over the past three years, I think I've upgraded that box two or three times "inline" - that is, I changed the addresses for the Mandriva repos in the media manager and just had the machine update. This had the effect of upgrading from the previous release of Mandriva to the most current release. It actually took quite a bit longer to do it this way, but it was mostly flawless and hassle free. I went to bed, and when I got up mycomputer desktop had that "new computer" feel to it.

Of course, that meant that the cruft and misconfiguration that was there when I went to bed was still there too. Now, I've done enough fresh installs of Linux to know that it can be done easily with little pain. So, when I considered something rash that I knew might es'plode my existing OS, I just calculated the risk and did it. Here's how it went.

I wanted to install an application that my 18-month-old version of Mandriva (2010.0) didn't support. I found an rpm and tried it. No go - dependency issues. So, I considered activating a non-standard repo. The guys at Mandriva Italy pretty much roll their own distro. They backport a lot of things you can't get in other releases. So, I went ahead and activated the appropriate repos and tried the install. Still no go - still dependency issues.

At this point, I figured updating my whole system from the Italian repos would do the trick. I also knew that was risky. If I didn't do it correctly, or if it was just not setup to catch everything on my out-of-season release, I could watch my system go "Boom!"

Once again I was wrestling with the idea that I could play it safe and work with this desktop until it craters, or I could force the issue and deal with the aftermath one way or the other. I am a risk-taker by nature and I've got a weekend coming up. I dropped a hammer on the updates.

Some 480 files later, everything looked good. Stuff was working and I hoped that I had dodged a bullet. As we all know, the thing isn't over until the Rubinesque soprano has taken her bows. I issued the command to restart the system. It seemd to boot okay, process loaded, file systems mounted, nothing out of the ordinary failing. Until, that is, it came time to run KDE. At that point a kde config file either failed or was not found.

Boom!

I checked ownership in .kde4 and tried starting a different desktop, but as luck would have it, all I had installed was IceWM. A little research later and it's obvious that I had updated some QT files to versions that were not compatible with my KDE version. I tinkered with an attempt at fixing all that, but one of the Mandriva repos was not responding for some reason. This was likely because I was running an old release. I could have pointed that repo to a new mirror, but I decided to cut my losses.

Here was another fork in the road. I either reinstalled my old release of Mandriva restored from backup, downloaded the newest release of Mandriva on my laptop and burned a CD, or inistalled another OS. As some of you may know, I've been easing over to Mageia. I've got Mageia on my laptop and like it. I've put it on other systems and it is very promising. Easy to install, easy to use, well developed graphical administration tools, attractive, large repositories, and established developers -- that's my kind of OS. I chose that path.

Installation took about 20 minutes. Updating took a bit longer. I installed Mageia from the DVD and have enough experience with this distro to know that I would have fewer issues if I juggled my user account and let Mageia create a new user for me, then migrate to that new account. I'll save you the boring details and just say that it worked with no trouble at all.

It's pretty rich, but this is Mageia 1. It's a mature distro because it builds on all the Mandriva that came before it. nevertheless, it's seen a lot of development since, and I had to install several hundred megabytes of code to bring it current. Once that was done, I rebooted to initialize the new kernel and hey, presto! new desktop. from there it was just a matter of installing the stuff that didn't come on the DVD and configuring my stunning Xplanet wallpaper, local network, etc. At this point, about three man-hours later, all I have left to do is configure passwordless ssh login so that I can get BackupPC on the job backing the whole thing up.

The new installation looks a little sharper and runs a little snappier than the previous one. I think some of that is due to development on the part of Mageia and some due to the fact that all the bit rot and cruft left over from so many inline installs is gone. I've got a little tweaking to do, but so far I'm really impresssed with Mageia and suspect it is the way forward for this user.

Just thought I'd mention it.


Mark

[isadora]

Thanks Mark for this nice piece of reading.
Have great fun with your fresh installed system, and let the magic overwhelm you.

[pmithrandir]

burned a CD

So old fashion

Next time, use a usb key. Installation is faster, and less pollution

Welcome to mageia !!!

[mark9117]

burned a CD

So old fashion

I know it's quaint, but this hardware was having trouble booting.

Next time, use a usb key. Installation is faster, and less pollution

I tried to boot a usb key I have with Mandriva 2010.1 on it at one point, but it didn't go very well.

Welcome to mageia !!!

Thanks. Good to be here.


Mark