Mandriva 2009 Upgrade

A little while back I decided that enough was enough. No sooner do I get to grips with the latest release of fedora, another one is churned out from those people Redhat. Now, I don't really have a problem with new releases. Secretly we all love having bleeding edge software running on our desktops. How many hours did you spend getting compiz/beryl to work as soon as you saw it for the first time. Software bling is a must - certainly for me anyway. But here is the sticking point. I do not want to have to re-install my machine everytime fedora pops out distros. So I decided to throw Mandriva 2008 on my laptop, knowing that very soon I will be able to upgrade to 2009.

A little while back I decided that enough was enough. No sooner do I get to grips with the latest release of fedora, another one is churned out from those people Redhat. Now, I don't really have a problem with new releases. Secretly we all love having bleeding edge software running on our desktops. How many hours did you spend getting compiz/beryl to work as soon as you saw it for the first time. Software bling is a must - certainly for me anyway. But here is the sticking point. I do not want to have to re-install my machine everytime fedora pops out distros. So I decided to throw Mandriva 2008 on my laptop, knowing that very soon I will be able to upgrade to 2009. I know the Gentoo zealots are going to tell me that they upgrade everytime they emerge. But what I need is an rpm based distro that I can use for every day purposes and when the need arises, I can upgrade without fear of fail.

Well I upgraded last night to Mandriva 2009, and 1659 packages later + the additional 250+ for KDE 4, I am sitting here with a shiny new distro on my new laptop.

What a joy. Everything bar a few minor little bugs seems to be in order.

The upgrade itself was a little hacky due to the auto upgrade applet being administratively disabled for a day or so to iron out a few bugs. So i did it the manual way of removing all the media and then obtaining the new media.and then upgrading.

# urpmi.removemedia -a
# urpmi.addmedia --distrib http://mirrors.telkomsa.net/pub/linux/mandriva/official/2009.0/x86_64/
# urpmi --auto --auto-select --replacefiles 2>&1 | tee upgrade.log

My initial impression of kde4.1 is thus far positive. I had purposely not touched the baby-eating 4.0 version but there are some nice features in 4.1 which will come in handy for me and the look and feel is great.

But for me the fact that everything which worked for me on 2008 seems to have no issues now it has been upgraded to 2009. As well as a in a personal capacity, I, like many others, use linux as a tool to do my work and I cannot really afford to re-install my OS every six months. It has become necessary for me to be able to upgrade my distro without fear of borkage and therefore the decision to move from Fedora after 5 years and nearly 10 versions, to Mandriva has been vindicated so far.

It has made me wonder - are users of FOSS are becoming a little picky? I have found myself instead of just being grateful that something works to now being a little bit more demanding. There is nothing wrong with the Fedora distro in my opinion, its just that I don't really want to backup everything, re-install and then restore data. It's too much effort. Is this right though to be fussy over something that I can effectively have for free? Its kind of like being given free cake and then deciding that don't want THAT cake - you need cake that has more sugar/cream/iron filings in it.

http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Home