mandriva updates, etc..

On 01/30/2012 04:35 AM, tw wrote:

Hi, y'all there...
for what's worth..
and reading all the troubling mail about updating to newer mandriva
versions or abandoning and moving to mageia
I am totally happy with my mandriva2009..., which i use since it came out
and definitely after trying to update to 2011 as advertised by the white-
arrow-in-blue-field sign..
got 139 unresolved errors so it all failed...
restored my mdr2009 stored image made earlier.., long live partimage and
sons
everything OK again...
do all things I want/need with mdr2009
even upgrading to firefox 9.0.1 was no problem...
but you people are right...
somewhere in time need to change to another distro...

Thanks for all the info and advises I could read in the group...

Tony Willems

A clean install, rather than an update, is almost always the better
choice, especially if jumping several versions.

I recommend you try this, if you have the free hard drive space - after
making sure you have a good back-up of your data, of course.

Using MCC, shrink the partition with the extra space, and create a new,
empty partition. 20GB should be enough, but you might get away with 15
if you don't get too fancy. Label it something like "Trials" so you know
what it is. (Don't use "Test." That is often used elsewhere and can
confuse things.)

Once that is done, make a clean install of the distro you want to try,
be it Mandriva, Mageia, or another, and direct the installer to use that
new partition. The Mageia installer, at least, will set Grub up so you
can boot into either install. The others should do the same.

This way, you can take your trial for a test drive without disrupting
your present production install. You can do this with as many distros
all at the same time as you have drive space for, or one at a time if
your space is limited.

Another alternative is to install VirtualBox and install your trials on
virtual machines. This is faster and easier, and can give you a pretty
good "feel" for the distro. It's a good first step to weed out those you
don't want to try after all. But good as VirtualBox is, a virtual
machine won't give you quite the same "feel" as a true install, so you
may still want to make the trial described above before committing yourself.

Some say to use a live CD to get the "feel" of a distro. That may be OK
for them, but it's never worked well for me. To me, the live CD is
always very different than working with an actual hard drive install.
YMMV, of course.

Whichever distro you choose, good luck!

TJ