> Mandrake 7.0 complete that I purchased from Office Depot about 5 months
> ago. I am such a newbie (or was) :) that it took me so long to get
> things to work right. With the help of some wonderful souls on this
You talk as thought you're the only one Marcia? I guess the rest of us
are just too unwilling to admit it :-)
> If I decide to install or upgrade to 7.2 will that mess up everything or
> some things that I have working finally? Will my ethernet cable modem
> continue to work properly?
I don't think the transition from 7.0->7.2 will be as smooth as you might
like but it need not be a horrible process either. I don't think anyone
can answer whether your ethernet card is going to continue to function but
what I can say is that if you know how to make it work under 7.0 you
should be able to get it to work with 7.2 and there's a chance that 7.2
may set it up automatically for you.
Having said that, I wouldn't recommend doing an "upgrade." Rather, save
all your configuration files (with any luck you've actually got them on a
separate /home partition. THEN, do a clean install of 7.2. What you'll
probably find is that many of the software installations and upgrades that
you've done are already part of 7.2 so you won't have to do anything after
the installation to get those functional.
> It took me 4 months to figure out how to make
> it work. What is better , fresh install or upgrade? I read that the
Fresh install...and don't confuse how long it took to figure stuff out
with how long it will take to replicate it. You do maintain a change log
don't you? Some sort of book where you write down stuff you've done and
how you did it? Armed with that, it should take only a few minutes to get
your ethernet card functioning again if 7.2's automatic setup of such
things.
In my case, for instance, with 7.0 and 7.1 I needed to download
and install rp-pppoe for my DSL. With 7.2, that software is included and
I could enter account names and IP addresses during the installation. One
odd thing is that I've done this twice and one time the 7.2 install
decided that my ethernet card was eth1 (it's eth0) and the second time
everything set up properly. In both cases, however, it didn't take long
as I already knew what needed to happen.
> fresh install was fast however the upgrade was taking 5 hours or more.
> Any suggestions? Thank you for your help. Marcia
If you start out with all your personal config files and notes on what
changes you've had to make in the past it shouldn't take you much time
beyond the time of a fresh install, which means it's a lot faster doing it
that way than to do the upgrade which would be a hope and a prayer in my
view going from 7->7.2 because so much stuff has changed.
Cheers --- Larry
