I know Mandrake 9.2 is out, but 9.1 is the set of CDs I had lying around from CheapBytes waiting for my attention, so that’s what got installed.
After my relatively positive experience with this upgrade, I’m satisfied that if I want to go for for upgrade it’ll be straightforward. The rest of this article is some notes on things that prevented this from being a perfectly seamless upgrade.
And speaking of Mandrake, I gotta try this, portable OS and apps, data on my USB key, cool.
I’m running it as a server, so I have no experience with what might’ve changed with the desktop environments and how smoothly they are updated. Here are a few notes:
- I was upgrading from 8.1, partly because automatic updating of security patches via Mandrake Update is no longer supported for the older version. It also provides newer versions of MySQL and PHP, needed for some applications I wanted to try, so that was probably the final straw.
- Fortunately, it’s also the earliest version the Mandrake docs said a 9.1 install would upgrade. Backed up the system, booted from CD-1, click the Upgrade option in the installer. The rest of the questions were things I’d already gone through with the initial install.
- One thing that confused me was a screen that listed some RPMs that it said “needed to be deleted in order to upgrade the system.”
There were some things like MRTG and miscellaneous shared libraries associated with little-used apps, but I said don’t delete them and maybe that was the cause of some of the issues below, I guess I’ll never know.
No documentation found on the Mandrake site or on Google as to what the ramifications of answering one way or the other. I guess I need to bone up on urpmi a bit to understand what happened.
- Perl was upgraded from 5.6 to 5.8.
I’d used “-MCPAN -eshell” over the past couple years updating various packages needed for other programs I’m running like smokeping and MRTG.
I had to clean out the old 5.6 site_perl packages and re-install via CPAN again to get things up and running because modules in those directories were failing to load. Also, smokeping uses speedycgi and rrdtool, which needed a clean build and install to be compatible with those changes. This involved going to their sources and removing Perl-generated Makefiles and rebuilding.
- Postfix came up perfectly without me touching anything.
- So did Apache and its mod_perl config I use for running MovableType.
- Various apps are running under PHP, which got upgraded from 4.0 to 4.3, and they’re all working fine, with MySQL 4.0 running behind them.
- Various user accounts have cron jobs and they’re all functioning fine too.