I just downloaded new mandriva linux 2006. Now, i am confused whether to upgrade from mandriva 10.1, or to renstall the whole linux distro....

Is there any drawback in just upgrading?

mainly personal preferance...
if you have your system configured how you want it, you have your filesystem and home directories all nice and pretty, itll be quick and painless to just upgrade.
however, if everythings a mess and you have a lot of junk that you dont want to bother taking care of; format and install.

same advice,
many say small upgrade, you can update
big upgrade, do a full install

I trust you have your home directory in a separate partition already

seeing what people say about 2006, you may want to
make a dual boot 10.1 and 2006 if you know how to do it,

mind you bit of a jump from 10.1 to 2006, I'd say reinstall fully,
10.1 is sometimes said to be a bit buggy, so do you want to keep it?

If you have anything important, just do a backup first,
never too safe

Usually clean install are less problematic than major upgrades, so if its an option for you do a clean install.

This was one of the reasons why I changed my system to have the seperate /home partition as mentioned by
Emmanuel_uk.

I had tried the upgrade option a few times, and it always broke something somewhere. I never did find out what it is with the mandrake/mandriva upgrading facility, that seems to be "so rubbish" compared with the distro's overall reputation of being "friendly".

anyway, after I changed my partitioning scheme (which I actually did after trying gentoo for the first time), it was "a breeze", just to re-install/install an updated version. You just tell it that you don't want to format you /home (/dev/hda4 in my case, you may have something different, depending on kit).

The main distro is installed into the / partition so it means that as long as you install all the same software packages every time, then you should just be able to log into the new version but as user and everything "just" works. With no loss of data (files, customisations, address books etc etc).

Thats my

regards

John