While running the rpm -qa commands, I decided to try some other versions. I don't know if this matters but I have 2007.0, 2007.1, 2008.0 and 2 files for 2008.1.

x11-driver-video-intel-2.2.1-5mdv2008.1
x11-driver-video-i810-1.7.4-25mdv2008.1

This should be no surprise given all the messing around with X11 I have been doing. The question is, are the 2007 versions normal and can I just run urpm -e on those 2 files and let XFdrake reinstall the correct versions?

I don't think that's normal but you can easily fix it by removing the packages with urpme and then installing them again with urpmi, assuming you now have the correct 2008.1 repos setup it'll install the right ones.

(If it's saying it wants to remove a whole lot of other stuff as well you can remove the packages with rpm -e --nodeps instead)

I don't think it is that easy. There are 93, 2007.0 packages and 155 2007.1 packages. Why wouldn't setting up easyrpmi with just the updates for 2008.0 fix it?

Update: Given my messed up install condition, I decided try your suggestion, except using 2008.0 instead of 2008.1 to do the urpmi --auto-update with the suggested but appropriately modified media changes. It is currently running and has a ton of updates to load. I'll report back with my situation when it is done.

Thanks again for all your help.

I have upgraded as much as it can using urpmi. I still have 50 some odd packages that are 2007.0 and 2007.1 each. I also looked at my kernel. First, it is booting the wrong one. It is booting the right version 2008.0 but it is using 'desktop' rather than 'server'. Indeed, 'server' is not even listed by LILO. So I tried to add it and change to that kernel. Unfortunately, when I run 'drakboot', it gets an error writing the changes. It tells me /dev/hda is an unknown device type. Since that is my boot volume it seems like a bogus message but shows that I still have something seriously wrong. Suggestions?

Mandriva switched to grub sometime recently, can't remember if it was 2008.0 or which, but maybe drakboot as a problem because of that? Anyway you can easily manually edit the lilo.conf and then run lilo to apply it. Maybe start a new thread here if you're still getting errors from lilo.

If I were you I'd go through the list of those 100-odd old packages, check what they are and then search for each in the Software Installer and see if you can install the 2008.0 version, or simply remove them if you know they're not being used.

I think I figured out what happened. I found another HD and decided to install 2008.0 from scratch. My first clue was that it never asked if I was installing desktop or server. Apparently, I wound up "upgrading" 2007.1 server to 2008.0 desktop.

That the installer allowed that with no warning or confirmation is yet another gripe about the poor planning/testing of Mandriva installers. It also is apparent that the download libraries poorly identify (as far as I know it didn't at all in this case) which downloads are for server vs. desktop. In the past they have been the same download but the install/upgrade was a choice.

I don't see any choice now but to try to figure out which download is for server and do a clean install. Once again I've been hosed by crappy installation tools and haphazard download descriptions.

AFAIK there's no option to choose the desktop or server kernels in the installer - if you want the server kernel simply install it with urpmi post install. The differences are in pre-empting and support of greater than 4GB RAM apparently.

Anyway with the working 2008.0 system you should be able to simply urpmi kernel-server

Thanks. At this point things are too hosed to make me confident of a reliable system. I need to bite the bullet and do a clean install. It has already been 5 weeks so what is another couple? However, I will take your advice and stick with 2008.1 rather then 2009. On the other hand I dread the thought of upgrading to 2009. I KNOW what is going to happen.

This is a personal opinion, but if you intend to install (or upgrade to) Mandriva 2009.0, you may be best served to install it right off, rather than to install 2008.1 then upgrade. KDE4.1.3 has been released and it fixes many of the troubles initially encountered. The single qualifying statement I will make with regard to the KDE 4.1.x release is that KDE4 is a complete rewrite of KDE and bears no resemblance to its predecessors. Initially I missed many of the add ons I used with KDE3 which are not available for KDE4, but now that I have become more familiar with KDE4, I am very happy with it over all.

I find Mandriva 2009.0 boot time to be much shorter than any previous release, and overall system performance seems to be notably improved as well (e.g.: Firefox loads in seconds rather than minutes) while system stability remains excellent. Your experience may differ significantly from mine, but by installing 2009 initially, if all works well, you are set and you have saved yourself an install (upgrade). If things do not go as hoped, you have lost nothing since you would have had to do two installs (one as an upgrade) any way and you then will know that you should indeed stick with 2008.1 until 2009.1 is released.

As a side note, if you do not already have a home partition included in your partitioning arrangement (e.g: you set up at least a '/', a '/home', and a 'swap' partition during the installation process), you should consider doing so when you install Mandriva again (whether you install 2008.1 or 2009.0). With this arrangement, configurations for any user accounts are stored in the /home partition. When you run a clean install, the /home partition is not formatted by default so these user configurations can persist from install to install unless you choose otherwise.

HTH,

Thanks but it is too late now. I'm now at 2008.1 based on previous advice against 2009 until 2009.1 comes out. I am still struggling to get it working but I knew it was going to be a pain. Anyway I will be starting new threads to clear up some of my remaining problems.