Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Living with a Distribution: Personal Preference

I use Mandriva. Have used it almost exclusively for 'serious work' and on my home PC. That doesn't mean I don't use anything else. I have on my second harddisk, OpenSUSE, which I have not booted up since I-don't-know-when. I used it to use Jahsaka, a multimedia composing tool. Cool stuff, maybe I'll post some of the stuff I've done. But when I had no use for Jahshaka, I went back to my aging Mandrake 10.1.
I just upgraded from Mandrake 10.1 to Mandriva 2007. The most painless upgrade I've had. I took the usual percautions.
  • Made a list of all applications I had installed and prioritise them according to what I use most often.
  • Backed up everything.
  • Renamed my home directories.
  • Made sure the installation only touched the non-home partition.
And within a reasonable amount of time, I had everything running. It detected almost everything I have, except for my motorola-HSP-based winmodem (No tears there because I am using broadband). I updated the distribution, added the required respositories (more on that hereLink), and made sure again it didn't mess up my home partition. I created new user accounts using the old names. This will make my other family members feel at home as they try out the new stuff Mandriva has to offer. I move the user files but not the config files so that old settings don't interfere. And it was up and running.

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