"Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!"
Mandrake 9.0rc1 killed my big machine. Not totally toast: After a few hours of intensive care it was up and running good as new, but it was not an adventure for the squeemish and /really/ needs to be addressed before this gets into the hands of people who may not have years of Linux experience. It may be a rare situation, but it is a real situation. What went wrong? Disk space. The installation does not properly estimate the required diskspace (it was out by over a gigabyte) and when it runs out, ka-bam. In my case, I get to the summary screen (keyboard, mouse, printer confirmation) and if you answer OK, you get the error that RPM failed, in tty3 you can see it unable to open headers for the final packages, and the /real/ truth is that if RPM is writing to the disk when the disk fills up, the resulting database is corrupt. In fact, a lot of things get corrupt, and even the shutdown command won't work. The cure: I can't believe people still write software that assumes infinite resources. Memory is /finite/, and so is disk space. The install process should _verify_ it has sufficient space _before_ it paints itself into a corner. I know, that's easy for /me/ to say, but it's still true: My partition shortage comes from an 8.2 install's default partitions, so it's my guess that 9.0 needs a significantly larger root partition. The fix (or rather, _my_ fix) is to restart the install but scoot to tty2 and run lilo to fix the boot table, then reboot the machine on its own disk, move at least a gig of stuff to some other partition, then do the rpmdb --rebuilddb and reboot to retry the upgrade. Other issues: - because I had to upgrade twice in a row, RPMs that store the previous config as configfile.rpmsave bumped the real original into never-never land. - Mason was not removed so it had to be removed by hand from the http configs, and although Apache launches, all attempts to access it return Segmentation faults (similar to when you have module mismatches ... so it could be I have some legacy modules that are frustrating the upgrade) - both a USB and a PS2 mouse are installed in the XFConfig86, but only one of them gets Emulate3Buttons, and wouldn't you know, its the wrong one in my case. Easy fix. Why are there no 3-button trackballs? - ALT = Meta keybinding is gone again. What was the fix for that? - XFConfig86 set my max resolution to 1024 when the prior config was clearly 1152. Should be an easy fix. - Gnome desktop upgrades lose all previous panel config info; my guess is that there's great hoards of programmers working on this, but to be frank, my panels needed a good scrubbing anyway. -- Gary Lawrence Murphy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> TeleDynamics Communications Inc Business Advantage through Community Software : http://www.teledyn.com "Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."(Pablo Picasso)
