Upgrading your Linux system

LET'S REVIEW BRIEFLY before going on to upgrade our major Linux distribution. In my introductory article in this "Upgrading your Linux system" series subtitled Professionals keep a backup, I wrote about how one can mitigate the risks of an Operating System upgrade: keep a backup system. In the second installment subtitled Cloning a hard drive, I outlined a procedure for copying your Linux system and establishing that as a bootable, fully functional backup system. In this article I'll go over the upgrade process, and some other things.

But first, I need to acknowledge a couple of reader suggestions, as well as mention another alternative.

One reader asked about the Linux "dd" command as an alternative to copy Linux partitions exactly, bit for bit. That's fine, if your partitions on the two hard drives are exactly the same size. But it will not work as well as you'll like, if the partitions are different in size. If you have two identical hard disks and partition them precisely the same, it can work beautifully. But that's not very often actually the case.

Another reader mentioned that one might mirror the partitions on the two hard disks, then sync them. That might be straightforward, but I haven't researched and done that myself, so I must hesitate to recommend it.

However, another alternative that might be worth investigating for Linux is called "Ghost for Unix" and, if you are interested, you can check out "Ghost" here.

UPGRADING
We'll assume you have a good set of Mandrake 9.1 CDs. That means you'll have bought those either at retail or through any of the several online sources by mail-order, or downloaded, md5sum'd, and burned your own.

Or maybe you've copied those to a hard disk partition on the drive you want to upgrade (this is important, as the Mandrake 9.1 installer makes the assumption that you want to upgrade the drive where it finds these). And in this case, you will also have created a HD install diskette.

These and other Linux installation and upgrade procedures are outlined in my earlier series The INQUIRER guide to installing Linux.

I'm not going to go through an upgrade to Mandrake 9.1 screen by screen, as there's actually not too much to it. However, press "F1" at the first boot screen in the installer, then type "expert" to use Expert mode. It gives you as much control over your upgrade as Mandrake will permit.

Accept most defaults, unless the installer makes an obvious mistake you can recognize. Expert mode shows you more, and that's always better.

If you've followed my advice to clone your system and maintain a backup, the upgrade process will ask you which system on which hard drive you'll want to upgrade. Choose the one that's not currently your 'real" system, or the other, depending upon how devil-may-care you feel at the time.

The Mandrake 9.1 upgrade process will proceed to, well... upgrade all of the base system and packages you have installed. It doesn't give you any opportunity to add new packages, and this is a departure from an earlier upgrade behaviour. (The function of adding new packages to your Mandrake system has been taken over by the "Install Software" item in Mandrake's Configuration / Packaging menu, so it isn't a fault, just different.)

Installing software upgrades from Mandrake 9.0 to 9.1 will take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour or more depending upon the speed of your CPU, CD-ROM drive, and disk subsystem, as well as how much software you have installed. You might start this before "West Wing" and watch some TV.

When the Mandrake 9.1 installer finishes upgrading your base system and packages, it will present you with a Summary. Depending upon your system configuration, attached printer, network, and display monitor, etc., it may or may not have detected and configured all your system properly.

Here's where you need to click on the buttons provided and check out the configurations. Possibly you will want to adjust some. You can either do this methodically or key on the thumbnail description of each button.

If you happen to live in Los Angeles but the thumbnailed time zone says "New York"... well you're going to want to fix it. Similarly, check your the sound card configuration (somehow Mandrake 9.1 doesn't recognize the SoundBlaster! 5.1 card properly) and confirm your display configuration, or update it to XFree86 4.3 at a desired screen size and resolution.

Your network configuration should remain the same. If it looks wrong to you, by all means correct it. But the Mandrake 9.1 installer won't bring it up successfully during the upgrade process. They should fix this.

If you have a LILO (or GRUB) configuration that works, you might want to skip Bootloader update. Or you can enter the same parameters and let it rewrite that Master Boot Record (MBR) on your first hard drive for fun, but be aware that this sometimes fails. Always have a boot diskette.

Speaking of which, the Mandrake 9.1 upgrade will also give you a chance to create another boot diskette. Go ahead and do this, just in case. In fact, do this twice. Having only one boot diskette isn't very bright, as diskettes do go bad just sitting around, soaking up cosmic rays, etc.

You can try the online update step, but like I said, it doesn't work. At least, it didn't work for me. Maybe it'll work on your network setup.

That's it! Reboot to your new Mandrake 9.1 system and start using it.

But, one more thing.... If you're using Evolution as your email client, you can copy your /home/ userid/evolution directory from one disk to another. This will keep your email current if you switch systems. I have done this several times without corrupting my Evolution emails.

OBSERVATIONS
With its release of Mandrake 9.1, MandrakeSoft has incorporated a lot of new software that's cool and fun to have: KDE 3.1, the latest OpenOffice 1.10, Ximian Evolution 1.2.2, and MPlayer 0.90. (I may have missed some, too.) They've obviously put a lot of work into this new distribution.

However, and without pretending to present an exhaustive review, they do have some rough edges in this 9.1 release. They've redone their install scripting and -- while it looks cleaner -- it's still a work in progress and it shows in the way the scripts work in some places. If one installs instead of upgrading, some weird things can happen at times. This isn't a review of their install, so we'll let that pass. But I did try it out, and I'll just say that they haven't got the same level of sophistication that their installation scripts had in the earlier 9.0 release. This is perhaps to be expected, but MandrakeSoft needs to regain their balance between ease-of-install for novices and power-of-choice for experts.

If you've created a backup system and then upgraded to Mandrake 9.1, you can decide for yourself if it works well for you... or fall back to what you already had installed. I am keeping Mandrake 9.1 for my "production" system, but I'm also looking forward to a Mandrake 9.2 release soon. µ