Upgrading an existing OS install

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-10-06 08:52pm

Today, I have joined the small ranks of people who have actually tried to upgrade an OS from one version to another in-place, rather than nuking it and reinstalling from scratch.

Mind you, it was a Linux OS, so it went pretty smoothly. I had Mandrake 9.0 installed but there were some features in 9.1 that I wanted, so I stuck in the 9.1 CDs, let it do its automated "upgrade" thing, and left it alone.

Everything installed OK except for a couple of hitches. First, I'd removed the version of PHP on the system and replaced it with a version I'd compiled myself. Second, I'd removed the version of MySQL on the system and replaced it with an RPM I downloaded from the MySQL website. Third, I'd installed Flash, Java, and accelerated video drivers.

The system came up after the reboot, and I promptly let it install all of the updates for 9.1. Then I started digging around, and found that the auto-upgrader had taken the conservative approach ahd chosen not to install MySQL or PHP on top of the versions I'd put in place, so I manually nuked my versions and told the auto-installer to put everything in place. Then I got rid of a lot of old kernel versions that were not necessary any more, and reinstalled the NVidia drivers for my graphics card.

It works like a charm now. Flash works fine, Java works fine, web browsing works fine, all of my mail settings, desktop, and personal app settings are fine, the OpenOffice suite I'd installed before the upgrade still works fine. I can even play DVDs and UT2k3 without trouble, and without having to reinstall anything. Much easier than trying to manually upgrade pieces and parts of 9.0 so that it acts like version 9.1, and certainly much easier than removing and reinstalling.

In short, I can give a hearty thumbs-up to the Mandrake OS installer. The only one I've used yet which can upgrade an OS from one version to the next with basically no real headaches, even if (as is the case here) the kernel and several system apps had been removed and replaced with other versions.

Mind you, I don't plan to even attempt something like this with Windows.

SirNitram · Post by **SirNitram** » 2003-10-06 09:59pm

Done it with windows. If you keep all your drivers on-disc somewhere, it's not really an issue except for the obvious problems with needing new versions of some drivers.

But, seriously, it's never been a nightmare for me.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-10-06 10:35pm

Well, under Gentoo there's emerge system, IIRC. Apt-enabled distros (Debian, Apt-RPM RedHat) can do something similar too.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2003-10-07 10:44pm

Muahahaha I use Debian. As for self-compiled packages, I make my own *.deb binaries and install that, for easy removal.

Also, an advantage of *.deb is that any of those will usually work on most Debian-based systems (Lindows, Corel(Xandros now?), Librenix, Knoppix, etc.), while rpms are distro specific.

Apt-RPM has a smaller selection of ready-to-install stuff.

Are you using kernel 2.6?

The only thing I don't like about Debian is that everything is compiled for i386, as if anyone uses that anymore

. This includes packages that will never be able to run on i386 (ie- nearly all GUI based stuff). Performance increase for doing otherwise are probably neglible for most stuff though. They do have a seperate AMD-64 distro though, or planning one.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-10-07 10:53pm

Pu-239 wrote:Muahahaha I use Debian. As for self-compiled packages, I make my own *.deb binaries and install that, for easy removal.

It wasn't hard to remove my versions of MySQL and PHP; I was just curious to see what would happen if I tried to auto-upgrade on top of them. As it turned out, it simply exempted those particular packages from the upgrade process and upgraded around them.

Howedar · Post by **Howedar** » 2003-10-07 11:20pm

My personal experience has been that switching operating systems is such a hassle (not necessarily a technological one, but just having the OS operate differently) that you might as well go all out and reformat.

aronkerkhof · Post by **aronkerkhof** » 2003-10-08 01:17am

Very nice. Its good to see Linux making strides in this area. My last attempt at upgrade was Redhat 5.2 --> 6.0. Ouch.

I've just formatted since then, since I'm not near leet enough to try to go through that again. But I might give it a shot. You think Redhat 8 upgrades as nicely?

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2003-10-08 01:47am

I've never had any problems with this procedure. Then again, I'm running Mac OS X.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-10-08 09:33am

RH8/RH9 upgrade cleanly, though the 'home' version of RH Linux has been sent off to the public Fedora project.

Durandal · Post by **Durandal** » 2003-10-10 09:28pm

I just went from OS X v10.2.8 to v10.3. There were a few initial hiccups with my USB 2.0 card drivers ("hiccups" meaning they were causing untraceable kernel panics because the OS has native support for the card now), but after I got rid of those, things have been running pretty smoothly. For some reason, though, my video input viewer causes the system to freeze, so I avoid that.

The biggest problem I have right now is my mouse. With Microsoft's latest drivers, my clicks are being interpreted very strangely. Sometimes if I leave the cursor over an object and try clicking, nothing happens until I move the cursor around and click again. I remember this kind of behavior sporadically in 10.2.x, but it seems to have really gotten worse in 10.3. Does this sound like a hardware issue? The mouse is going on two years old.