Upgrading blues

auto-upgrading in Mandrake/Mandriva with versions 10.1 to higher versions doesn't seem to be dangerous. I've not had trouble with 10.1, 10.2, 2005, 2006 (unless 10.2 *was* 2005, I forget).

so I decided to upgrade in place from 2005 to 2006. Most things worked pretty well. Certainly, there isn't the wholesale breakage that comes with earlier versions where urpmi and rpm themselves break and can't continue at all without some tedious surgery (copying, rpm and all necessary things from a working installation, or installing a fresh copy of the original revision from CD).

Some things need tweaking. This seems almost always to be the case. There was some flakiness in apache (Mandriva uses 2.0 for it's default apache version now, version 1.3 is now apache1), and the php sub-packages are now much finer-grained, so an automatic upgrade didn't upgrade php-postgres support (although I thought it should have). There was more bogosity with apache2 and php 4 versus apache2 and php 5, I was getting some sort of segmentation fault when calling php programs. Since that was probably a throwback from some old apache or php packages that did not get upgraded, I uninstalled everything apache and php related and then reinstalled them (with php 5 now, although in production I use php4, it's a good time to review php5 on my laptop, for future upgrading of production).

As always, the new kernel broke things (sound stopped working in ALSA, although in OSS it usually works (but not always, and I don't know why that is), but then I can't change the volume so I really need ALSA to work, the usb keyboard and mouse don't work if I use the kernel from Mandriva 2005, so I can't stick with that unless I'm on the road). SWSusp doesn't work with this laptop and the original Mandriva 2006 kernel (2.6.12-14mdk), the laptop suspends to disk, but then it won't wake up correctly, instead, freezing. I built a kernel from the 2.6.12-14mdk source that loads from suspend correctly but the sound is still flaky, so I'll probably keep working on this until it works or I give up, download a linus kernel and build that.