I just went through an upgrade of my 10.0 desktop machine to 10.1 and learned a lot, and I thought I would post my experiences for anyone that might benefit from them. I used urpmi to make the upgrade over the network, and everything is up and running stable now, but I did have a few troubles.
First use easyurpmi to set your urpmi sources to a 10.1 tree. I used a local mirror, but any ftp source will do. When you run urpmi --auto-select, the first thing urpmi does is update itself and any dependent packages and then restart itself. Part of this initial round is the glibc, the core of your system. I highly recommend that you reboot after doing this. I had a lot of packages not install properly after this and I think it is because of parts of the old glibc being resident in memory. I solved the problem by removing and reinstalling most of the userspace packages, but this took more time than doing a clean install. I think I could have avoided this with a reboot. I think it would be a good idea to uninstall a lot of your optional packages, and then reinstall them after you get the base up and running. It will help cruft from forming. For instance, if an app increased by a major version, the new package may install alongside the old package if the packager did not properly use an obsoletes in the new package. After installing the new kernel with a 'urpmi kernel' also make sure you install udev and uninstall devfs before rebooting into the new kernel. You can use devfs to manage your devices if you wish, but since it is now deprecated in favor of udev, the switch is recommended. udev would be installed by default if you did a clean install anyway. If you use the nvidia binary drivers, there is two things you need to know. 1) The nvidia installer does not work with the default 2.6.8.1 kernel, and 2) if you get the modules built, you have to add the line 'nvidia' to your /etc/modprobe.conf file to get the udev device nodes created. An alternative way would be to edit the udev scripts, but since this is the newbie list, editing the modprobe.conf file is hard enough. To get the nvidia drivers installed, you have to extract the source and make a small edit. Instructions to do so are found here: http://www.linuxhelp.net/forums/index.php?act=ST&f=3&t=4866 If you are having trouble with the switch to udev, and more specifically, an error message "devfsd used instead of udev!" even though devfs has been uninstalled and udev has been installed, this is probably because of a hidden file in the /dev directory named .devfsd. Simply delete this file and restart the udev service and all should be well. I have been updating this machine all along with plf and eslrahc packages, as well as building a few of my own, so this machine was clearly not a stock install. I was left with quite a bit of cruft in the config files which I deleted or merged manually. Note that this is mostly because I don't like cruft on my computer. Everything was working fine before I started this task. The OpenOffice.org quickstarter will be installed by default in a clean install, so you may want to make sure you 'urpmi oooqs' in order to take advantage of this handy tool. It will dramatically increase the speed with which OO.o loads. You will get an error message when you exit your desktop saying that there is a hidden instance of OpenOffice running. This is a bug in oooqs and is just oooqs detecting itself. You can safely ignore it. All in all, I am happy with the results, but I must say that there were fewer troubles using this technique from 9.2 to 10.0. I hope this helps anyone that is considering doing this. -- /g
____________________________________________________ Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com ____________________________________________________
