I tried to upgrade my LE 2006 to LE2007 as previously posted an was disappointed that some files were missing. For one, I could not add Internet sharing to the LE 2007 because some files (bind for one) did not come with the installation cd. I am very disappointed and am considering to move to Suse 10.2 . My question is would the Suse installer see my /home (with all my docs, etc) on a diff drive and a) not format it, or b) retain it as my data directory ?

The openSUSE installer recognizes different partitions and allows you to mount them as you wish. For example:

sda1 /
sda3 /home
sda5 swap

This is equally true of different partitions on the same drive (my example) or different partitions on different drives. If you already have a separate /home partition identified (hard for me to tell from your post), the installer will leave it alone. However, if your installation is in the same partition (not counting swap), everything would probably be lost. In such a case, you would want to back up your /home directory to CDs or DVDs. Actually, you probably want to back up /home for any new or upgrade installation.

First, I do not understand why I keep seeing posts about other distributions in this (Mandriva) forum, but that is just me ...

If you installed Mandriva 2007 with a single CD, my guess is that you used a Mandriva One Live CD to do the installation. There is nothing wrong with that, but I think it is a bit unrealistic to expect a single CD to contain the full range of software available for use with Mandriva Linux.

There are mirrors of the Mandriva Linux Distribution on ftp servers across the Internet. Each mirror has the Main, and Contrib repository trees which in turn contain the full range of Open Source Software packaged for use with Mandriva Linux. In addition, there are plf mirrors across the Internet that have the plf free and non-free repository trees which in turn contain non-free and proprietary software packaged for use with Mandriva. Each of the above mentioned four repository trees contains several branches. Each branch is called a Software Media Source.

Finally, there is a WEB site ( Easy URPMI) designed to make it relatively easy to set up Mandriva Linux to use these Software Media Sources when you want to add new software or update currently installed software. I have put together an article on the subject on my LQ blog as well as a few other bits I think may be helpfull to others.

HTH,