On Sunday July 28 2002 02:29 am, Alastair Scott wrote:
> On Sunday 28 Jul 2002 1:45 am, Tom Brinkman wrote:
> > I admire your persistence to save the home an' hearth ;) First,
> > IMO, current 9.0 KDE3.0.2 is much better than any of the available
> > 'KDE3.x' upgrades for 8.x. As is Gnome2, so why try'n save the old
> > 8.x shi.. err.... I mean stuff ?
>
> The 'stuff' that's moved from old to new is just .....rc files and
> similar (kmailrc and so on); there's many hours of configuration in
> those. Certainly not any of the desktop icon themes, for example!
>
> Alastair
In early June I saved a copy of 8.2's /home/tom to a storage
partition and did a fresh install of 8.3/9.0 (the 6/6/02 'alpha'
release). Immediately after the install, I copied the 8.2 /home backup
into 9.0, which instantly broke the whole system. I sort'a knew it
would ;) KDE wouldn't even start. Re-installed 9.0, and the first thing
I did was copy in from backup, my /Mail dir. Then Kmail had all my
saved, old to current emails and folders. In trying to copy in 8.2
kmailrc files (I saved the existing 9.0 rc files first), kmail broke.
So I reinstated the 9.0 kmail rc files, and reconfigured the newer
kmail version.
It took a few minutes, not "many hours". I had a similar experience
with KNode, several others. All in all, copying in what I could from my
/home backup, and reconfiguring everything I normally use, including
installing a few apps that don't come with Mandrake took little more
than an hour, maybe two at most. Granted I've had to do all this many
times in the past with Mandrake version upgrades, so I pretty well know
in advance, what will/won't work, what can be saved/what shouldn't be.
A lot of this knowledge comes from lurking on the cooker mailing list.
Since June, I've kept 9.0 current using 'urpmi --auto-select' on
cooker mirrors. Occaisionally, some package upgrades will overrite a
old config file. Sometimes configuration is moved, and the old config
is obsolete (eg, ~/X11/fs/config for Gnome2 apps). The developers try'n
hold this to a bare minimum, but sometimes it's neccessary. Which is
just part of why a saved 8.2 /home won't work with 9.0. Other major
reasons are the vast changes in libraries and gcc. So for example,
stuff like flash, (Sun) java, and other 3rd party closed source stuff
is mostly worthless. At least until they get around to upgrading their
apps to the new gcc/libs. The vendors will have to, Mandrake can't do
it without their source, or for legal reasons. Many cookers have
reported some success with getting nvidia's src.rpms and other 3rd
party stuff to rebuild on 9.0 using IGNORE_GCC_MISMATCH=1 on src.rpms.
I haven't bothered.
In the past week, cooker has moved from gcc 3.1.1 to 3.2, requiring
that most all packages in 9.0 be completely rebuilt. Practically the
whole distro. I can't upgrade with just a dialup, so I'm stuck with
roughly 9.0b1 till I get 9.0beta2 CD's. When they come out, I already
know a complete wipe and fresh install will be wise, if not just plain
neccessary. So, much less 8.2 isn't compatible with 9.0, 9.0b1 isn't
even compatible with 9.0b2. While an upgrade might be possible, it
_would_ probly take "many hours" and lot'sa fixin. Easier an simpler
just to wipe, re-install, and do a little reconfiguring, save from
backup whatever's possible, re-do what isn't.
I never could figure out any worthwhile purpose for desktop icons
other than to clutter things up, any OS. The menu works just find for
starting stuff, sometimes better. First thing always I do after a
fresh install is to delete all /Desktop icons except for Trash, which I
move so that the icon no longer appears. Takes a minute ;> YMMV
--
Tom Brinkman Corpus Christi, Texas
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
