I decided to give the new Mandriva 2007.1 RC1 a try. Since I mirror cooker, I figured I’d do a straight “urpmi —auto-select” upgrade on my 2007 box rather than downloading a bunch of ISOs. So it’s not really RC1 (really, with a few hundred packages being changed since the RC was cut, I think calling it a beta might be better but whatever), but it’s cooker current as of 10:00am my time (did a quick rsync to make sure I had the latest of everything).
I’m a GNOME user when I’m using Linux, so I was logged into GNOME when I fired up gnome-terminal, did a “urpmi.removemedia -a” then added the main/release and contribs/release media.
Overall the install went well. 930 packages, 1861MB, and 42 minutes later, the system was upgraded. urpmi told me it was going to remove libpython2.4-devel (due to unsatisfied python == 2.4.3), didn’t want to upgrade suspend-scripts due to missing wltool, and was going to remove libguile12 due to an unsatisfied guile == 1.6.8. Fine, no worries although python could concern some people (don’t worry, this is because python 2.5 is being installed, so you get libpython2.5).
Unfortunately, the install failed at package 928 of 930 due to libiso9660_5 being missing (either not on the mirrors or has been replaced and the hdlists hadn’t been upgraded). No worries. Doing another “urpmi —auto-select” afterwards installed another 4 packages… wierd… by my count there should have been 1 package left.
Now the wierdness begins.
Well, for one, 2007.0 updates have kernel 2.6.17.12mdv. But 2007.1 only has 2.6.17.11mdv. Huh? Someone should fix that pretty quick.
The upgrade didn’t install x11-driver-input-evdev, which was one of two errors preventing X from starting. The second was a X version mismatch on the fglrx driver. I believe I had installed the proprietary ATI drivers with ATI’s package way back when.. been a while so I don’t really remember. Anyways, I added the non-free/release media and installed dkms-ati. Still didn’t work. After using urpmf, I determined I needed to install the ati package as well (why this isn’t a requirement of dkms-ati I have no idea). Once that was done, X would start.
My hostname got removed. My machine has the cool name of “cerberus”… imagine my dismay when it had the (ultimately boring) name of “localhost”. Ugh. A trip to the Mandriva Control Center fixed that.
I suspect urpmi removed xscreensaver and didn’t tell me. Why? Well, I had screensavers before, and I also had the screen lock after 10 minutes. I had to urpmi xscreensaver. Screensavers are back. xlockmore is already installed. Screen still doesn’t lock. When I tell GNOME to lock the screen it does a whole lot of nothing. Doesn’t even kick in the screensaver. Too bad, because I wanted to watch Bob burn (Xflame). And the “power management” button in the screensaver preferences does nothing. I should have checked after I’d been away from the machine for a few hours whether or not the monitor got turned off. Heck, the screensaver preview doesn’t work either. Something is broken here I think.
I haven’t played too much more with it to poke around with other stuff. vmware server works, so I’m happy… the rest doesn’t much matter provided that a) zsh works, b) gnome-terminal works, and c) vmware-server works. Beyond that, I don’t much care (although a non-working screensaver is a little irritating… so is the fact that the session doesn’t lock).
GNOME doesn’t look any different. I can’t really determine quickly what’s different about it. KDE looks ok; I can tell it’s changed. Nothing overly exciting there, but KDE doesn’t do it for me.
I tried to see if I could make Metisse work. I got it enabled, then tried to log in with GNOME and it just sat there. CTRL-ALT-BKSPACE’d out of that, tried KDE and now I have 9 virtual desktops. Ok… I can switch them, but I didn’t see any of the fancy transitions that I noticed in the demos. I suppose there’s more to be done to configure it, but nothing in MCC or the menus jumped out at me as a “Metisse configuration tool”. Maybe there isn’t one?
All in all, the upgrade went pretty smooth. All things considered, I think this is the best verison upgrade I’ve done yet (normally I do a wipe and reinstall). Everything, except the screensaver, came up just as good as before. At quick glance, doesn’t look like much has changed from a GUI perspective. I haven’t done much looking under the hood to see what else has changed… I’ll leave that for later tonight or tomorrow.