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The upside of my recent computer troubles is that my computer finally got all those critical upgrades that it so desperately needed, not the least of which is an OS upgrade. I have been running Mandriva since it was Mandrake 9.0, with the most recent incarnation of the Operating System being Spring 2007. As a general rule, I avoid upgrading until the last possible moment, just because of the backing up process. With 5 people using the same computer, 4 of them media hungry teenagers, there are usually several DVD’s worth of files to archive. So, yeah, I avoid it.
However, this time I didn’t have a choice in the matter, as I couldn’t get in far enough to back anything up. So, as long as I was doing upgrades, I decided to go ahead and upgrade the OS to Mandriva 2008 Powerpack. I am so glad that I did.
I did a clean install (as opposed to an upgrade), and it went as smoothly as I have come to expect from Mandriva. My hard drives are partitioned in such a way that all our personal files are kept well and truly separate from the operating system files. This left me free to format the root partition, without touching the home partition where all our data resides.
The install was done in about 30 minutes, and then came the moment of truth. What would I find when I first logged into my account? What I found was… Everything! All my files were there, my bookmarks, my window manager settings (less a bit of eye candy), and my wall papers were exactly where I left them. Another 30 minutes installing the latest updates, and some programs that I need but are not installed by default, and I was up and running.
I love Mandriva!
The only real problem that I have encountered is this: It won’t detect my daughter’s Palm Pilot. This is a known bug, so I am expecting a fix in the near future, and in the larger scheme of things, relatively minor. The overall experience, combined with the improvements made in the newest version of Mandriva has sufficiently emboldened me to upgrade my wife’s laptop next. All I have to do is pry the machine from her fingers first…
Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 11:54 pmand is filed under Every day, Link Love, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
