I've come to the same conclusion. I always to a clean install. I do not consider this a step backwards to 1995. The changes that have taken place during the last two years in the xserver, the libraries, the desktops and many, many auxillary applications have been nothing short of ASTOUNDING! So many things chaning all at once. It is amazing to me that things work as well as they do. For example, KDE has come from nowhere to a potential WinXX killer in just 3 years. It took M$ 15 years to produce Win98SE and it still is junk. KDE2 is much more stable than my Win2000 Pro workstation at work. My W2KP crashed within minutes after it's first install and twice on the same day of it's second install. In the weeks since then I've lost count of the times it has crashed or rebooted on its own. That''s not to say that W2K is all bad.... it is more stable than Win98 or Win95 by as much as KDE2 is more stable than W2K, which is a lot. I am stay with SuSE and Linux because that is where the future is. The paradigm shift is already happening and M$'s moves to squeeze more money out of what they think are trapped users will only hasten their demise. Linus said recently that Linux will dominate the desktop within 5 years. With the progress that KDE is making, the ease of development using KDevelop, glade, Kylix and other tools, I am going to be optimistic and say three years. In the meantime there will be bumpy spots. I'm hitting one right now with my IDE PleXWriter 4/8/32. I wish now that I had spec'd it out as a scsi device, and my zip250 too. Device drivers is still a sore point with many devices, but we have a lot more now than we did 3 years ago. And, IBM's multi-billion dollar investment in Linux will produce a LOT of trickle down. GNOME may have hit on hardtimes with Eazel downsizing. We'll have to see how well the consortium pitches in with $$$ to help out. I'm not optimistic about them, considering how well they helped CDE. JLK On Saturday 31 March 2001 01:39, Konstantin (Kastus) Shchuka wrote:
I learned the hard way that the best way to upgrade is clean install.
I tried to upgrade 7.0 to 7.1. The net result is X server which does not start, yast2 does not start, a lot of packages missing files. Finally, after a lost day of work I did a clean install. My /home was on a separate partition, and I saved my /etc from 7.0 before doing clean install.
It looks like we are back to Slackware circa 1995 when a new realease of distribution meant a clean install. RPM and YaST supposed upgradeability of the system. But now the difference even between the releases within one major version number appear to be too big.
-Kastus
On Sat, Mar 31, 2001 at 01:54:41AM -0500, Rick Green wrote:
I'm in the process of doing an upgrade from 6.4 to 7.1. yast2 presented me with three packages which had *lower* version numbers on the 7.1 distribution, than I had loaded from the 6.4 distribution. I told it to go ahead and replace the packages anyway, figuring that you must know something I don't know. In other upgrades, I've encountered some packages which were 'split' into two or more new packages. Since I just told it to replace existing packages, and then add the minimum of new packages to resolve dependencies, will I have a complete system? Is there some list somewhere of 'split' packages, so I will know which packages I have to install to get back the full functionality I had? How about 'renamed' packages? Are there any packages which contain the same programs, but which go by different names between 6.4 and 7.1? Will I have to manually uninstall the old and install the new ones?
-- Rick Green
"I have the heart of a little child, and the brain of a genius. ... and I keep them in a jar under my bed"
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