A few days ago I went through the agonizing (wait. . .) process of upgrading from 7.0 to 7.1. I bought the boxed set from Linuxland, the "official" McMillan set, which in this case consisted of an installantion CD, a sources CD, and an application CD. I expected the wait, as I had been following the threads relative to upgrading in this list. I had been warned about sufficient memory, etc. I have a K6-2 450 and 64 mb of RAM. Still, the upgrade, when it came to the actual installation/upgrading of packages, took over 6 hrs, and then when it was 99% completed, it froze at the point when it asked for the application CD, complaining about the media being corrupt or some such. It was late, and my wife wanted to use Windoze, so I wanted to just get out of the installation process, even thinking I might have trashed everything already. No dice. The program would not let me exit, and none of the secret handshakes worked. So I hit the reset button. Well, I'm not sure how complete or incomplete the upgrade may have been, but my Linux still boots just fine, and it gives me a mixed message, saying I have 7.1 Helium installed, but also indicating that the old 2.2.14-15 kernel is operative. However, when I go to the /boot directory, I find that the vmlimuz link points to 2.2.15-4mdk. Since /etc/lilo.conf points to the vmlinuz link, I have to assume that maybe the newer kernel is actually booting. Not sure. But I do know that something filled up my / directory completely in the process, so I had to do some shifting of sources from my /home/src directory to /usr/src. I have /usr on its own partitiion. So, I guess this is just some ramblings about what may or may not have occurred when I "upgraded." I think most stuff actually did upgrade before the process froze. I really didn't want to go through all the configuration stuff anyway, as that is already taken care of, so it was a good place to stop. In future, I believe any upgrading will be incremental. If I want a new kernel, I will upgrade the kernel, etc. I suspect that there was little benefit to the "upgrade," and I wonder what surprises await. But we Linux guys like surprises to solve, don't we? Don J.
