Mandriva: manual or automatic updates?
 

I have Mandriva 2008.0. Almost every day I get the message, that there are new updates to install and I do this. Works perfectly.

But will Mandriva 2008.1 also be installed automatically, or do I have to do this manually?

Same question for Firefox: this week I got automatic updates 2.0.0.14 and 2.0.0.15. Will Mandriva propose version 3.0 automatically or is such a "major upgrade" always manual?

Thanks!

Mandriva 2008.1 will not be installed automatically. You need to upgrade using a cd/dvd or if you are bold and good at trouble shooting, you can change your urpmi sources to those of Mandriva 2008.1 and use "urpmi --auto-select --auto" to upgrade to 2008.1.

Thanks for your quick answer!

Good at trouble shooting? We're in the newbie section here :-)

I've often got in trouble for assuming that people posting in the newbie section didn't have a clue about what they were doing, so now I just give as much detail as I can and leave the rest to the individual looking for help. ;)

I have upgraded Mandriva (never reinstalled) since Mandrake 7.2.

Upgrades from release to release NEVER go smoothly. I always find myself debugging things. This isn't true just of Mandriva, of course. It is true for pretty much all operating systems (including Windows). Unfortunately, Mandriva is not the exception to the rule.

Right now, I have pointed urpmi at the 2008.1 updates, and I have installed a few of them (xorg and some other things), but since I am in the middle of getting a deliverable out for a client, I have not proceeded with the update.

I'm thinking about it though, and when I have a day to kill on it I'll do it.

Well, I did it. I upgraded to Mandriva 2008.1 completely from the repositories, using an FTP program (ncftp) and urpmi. I did the base system first, then perl, then gcc, then kde, then a whole bunch of other things. I am now done, and the system is 2008.1. I don't even have a 2008.1 dvd.

The advantage to doing it this way? Well, it killed some time :). Also, I got a chance to look over pretty much all of the packages in the system while I did this, and that was useful...I did a reasonable amount of cleaning up along the way. Further, I did this upgrade while the machine was up and running, and I was even doing some work while it went on.

I only had to reboot once, and that was to change the kernel. I was down then for about 15 minutes because I also had to recompile the NVIDIA driver to match the new kernel.

This upgrade took a long time doing it this way, but I got a chance to clean up the system a bit while I did it, AND it went relatively smoothly this way. There were some hiccups, but I got to deal with them as they came up rather than have them propagate through an entire install and leave me with a mess, and the system was running and in production for almost the entire time.

Do I recommend this procedure to everyone? No. But, given that I have never reloaded since Mandrake 7.2 and just keep upgrading, for me it was a useful way to find some really old stuff and some broken packages that were in the system and get rid of them. Also, the total time I spent out of service while I debugged the upgrade was nearly zero, while the usual upgrade has me working for awhile to make the system function properly again. Whenever I hit a problem, I solved the problem before proceeding with the upgrade; kept everything manageable and the system was never out of service.

Wall clock time on the upgrade this way was a bit less than two working days. But during that same time, I completed a release of a little project of my own that I had been working on, established a place for it on sourceforge, and uploaded it. So I developed and upgraded in parallel. It worked out OK. Also, when you allow for the time to download the dvd iso, then install, two working days isn't out of line - and during the install the machine would have been out of service for a few hours, and debugging if everything didn't go smoothly would have kept it out of service for probably a few more hours. So this was OK.

Thanks for your very useful answer! I can't spare two days now, but it seems a very interesting experience that I would like to try next year, after my retirement. Thanks!