When Mandrake 9.2 comes out to the general public, how do I upgrade from 9.1? Would I have to burn the ISO images onto CD and reinstall? I don't want to lose my settings and data. Or, will I be able to go ino my Mandrake Control Center and choose the Mandrake Software Update and it will update my 9.1 to 9.2?

AFAIK, there is a boot option called Upgrade. Boot from 9.2 CD and then choose Other [expert]

what does AFAIK mean?

As Far As I Know

whether you do a clean install or try to do the upgrade (good luck on that btw) you should do a backup of everything you consider important. mail, user settings, valuable data, etc, etc, etc....... this way if you if you do the clean install, you just copy over your backups, and you're ready to go. it's also good to do this in case the update fails and you end up having to reinstall anyway.
i've tried doing the upgrade twice. failed miserably each time. ended up with a lot of broken programs.
i got my copy of 9.2 final this morning from bittorrent and will be doing a clean install probably on tuesday.

AFAIK, this scares me! I don't know how to do a backup of all my files. Is it easy? AFAIK, I may screw up my whole computer! AFAIK, would it be worth it to upgrade to mandrake 9.2 if my Mandrake 9.1 is already running perfect? AFAIK, it's running perfect.

AFAIK, it's as far as I know

Seriously though, will I only lose my Mandrake information, or my whole linux partition?? I saved all my important media files and documents on linux rather than Windows. Now I'm kind of scared because I can't copy from windows to linux. If I risk only losing Mandrake, I can live with that but losing my important data files... that's scary!!!!!..... AFAIK

doing a backup of files is easy. just copy anything you want saved to a different partition. things like your mail folder, config files (those are things like user settings, high scores on your fave games, etc), or anything else that you don't want to lose. most of that stuff will be in your /root and or /home directory. there is a way to copy from win to linux, but unfortunately i don't recall the name of the program. but you don't need to copy from win to linux to restore your data. if the upgrade is successfull, then you don't need the backups. if you do a clean install, simply boot into linux, then copy the files you backed up to their appropriate locations and linux is back the way you had it. only with all the new features, upgraded apps, etc.
it's actually a good habit to make regular backups of things like that, and burn them to disk. that way if say your hard drive decides to puke, once you reinstall your os, you can restore everything else.
hmmmmmm, now that i think of it, i should probably practice what i'm preaching. lol i think my last backup cd is close to 2 years old. lol
question. how do you have you're h/d partitioned? when i was dual booting i had 5 partitions.
windows (c drive)
windows swap
linux
linux swap
storage (fat32 formatted)
the purpose of the storage partition was for saving my data and backups. plus since it was formatted as fat 32, it was accessable by both linux and win98. this setup is probably the best for a dual boot. when you need to reinstall you only need to format the partition that contains your os, whether it be linux or wintendo.

If you CAN, you WILL

Upgrades have never worked for me. YMMV

One option is to create a FAT16/32 partition and dump all your data there. Most distros don't touch FAT/NTFS partitions unless you explicitly say so.

--ManK

IMHO, wait a couple months to upgrade...until they work out the bugs. Like you said, 9.1 is running perfectly...*same here*. That's just my

Ugh, but I'm so tempted to upgrade to 9.2!!! I want to see if it's any better!! lol

give 9.2 a chance to settle down, i'm the guy that just posted the opposite of yours (9.2 -> 9.1) and for good reason. 9.2 is more like 9.0 in that it won't be really ready until 9.3

i've been in this business for almost 20 years, your get a feeling about such things...

cheers

- perry

is there a way to do a fresh install but it rememebers all of the programs that you had on your old install, aka export a package selection list that I can open in the installer? I did an upgrade via the ftp with urpmi, and things are messy. I want to know how to do this best when isos come out to the public

It might work if you dump all the rpms on the disks into one directory on your hd. Say into /data/rpm. Then setup urpmi
urpmi.addmedia 92rpms -f file://data/rpm

Then deactivate all software sources except 92rpms, and do
urpmi --auto-select
It should update all packages that have been updated from 9.2rc2 to 9.2. I can't guarantee that this will work though. This is essentially an upgrade and not a fresh install. I don't think you can do what you are asking for with a fresh install.

I got my copy of 9.2 this weekend and upgraded last night. every thing went ok.

I had the following problems

1. Konsole was missing, I had to install it separate (this issue was noted by someone on mandrake club forum for 9.2 RC1, still isn't fixed.) I also read that Kmail was missing, I don't use it so I don't know.

2. Run command is now missing from menu and right click on desktop, I added "application launcher" to K panel as a work around

3. SuperKaramba themes don't work

4. urpmi is broken, Can't add sources, I think update source worked if you didn't remove them, but like a dumb ass I removed them all to try the new functions.

I have been using Mandrake since 6.2 and have found that upgrades historically have been very erratic. I have always backed up my /home directory and installed new. This is the first upgrade that I would say that I've done that was successful. For now I will stay with the upgrade, it seems to be working ok, minus the 3 things listed above. I would recommend a fresh install though.

hmmmmmm, only one problem with that. mandrake hasn't done a x.3 release in years. they have already announced that the next release will be 10.0 due out around march. so if you wait for 9.3, you'll have a long wait.