Looking for upgrade advice

[marek_online]

Hi,

I'm pretty keen to upgrade to Hardy from Gutsy on my Pavillion laptop (AMD64; 2Gb ram; NVidia). What I'm wondering is, should I?

I'm not just trolling here, my particular question is this: I have CrossOver Wine installed to get certain bits of software running for a course I'm studying (regular Wine just didn't do the trick). If I upgrade, will I lose it? If I do a clean install rather than an upgrade, and then reinstall Wine afterward, will the configuration carry over easily (I have /home on a separate partition, so it wouldn't be lost)?

The main reason I'm looking to upgrade is to get USB back working again - at the moment if a device isn't plugged in and switched on at boot the computer won't pick it up, particularly annoying for a laptop user I can tell you. As far as I can tell that's a kernel issue (though I've also heard it could be a 64-bit-related KDE one, for whatever reason).

I've seen people raving about the performance improvements with Hardy, and others bitching about how slow it is. Any other AMD64 users out there got any particular advice? (If I'd known how poorly 64-bit was supported relative to 32-bit when I'd bought the machine....)

Anyway, any suggestions welcome.

[Snowhog]

Re: Looking for upgrade advice

Sounds like you have a 'production' system in the sense that what you have you 'need' for the course you are taking. I would suggest, that if you are happy with what you have now, and "can't afford" to loose any functionality you now have, not to upgrade - yet. However, that said, you have to options two consider.

1) Download the 8.04 KDE3.59 .iso and burn a LiveCD. Test it out with your system to see what works and what doesn't.
2) If you have space available on your HD, setup two additional partitions, one for root ( / ) and the other for home ( /home ), and then install 8.04 (creating a multi-boot system).

Option 1 is of course, benign, as it makes no alterations to your existing system.

[marek_online]

Re: Looking for upgrade advice

Thanks for the advice.

I've tried the Live CD, and it seems to work fine - the usb problem wasn't present at least - which makes it tempting to upgrade.

From what I can tell, all of the important CX Wine information is on /home - it's just the software and not the configuration that lives in /opt, which will probably get nuked by an upgrade or fresh install, so I might just go ahead in the next few days as hope for the best.

[marek_online]

Re: Looking for upgrade advice


So I upgraded overnight, and despite a few warnings about not being able to install the kernel (!) everything seems to have gone without a hitch - everything is working exactly as it was, and it even left Firefox-2 on the system rather that "upgrading" to the Beta which would break most of the functionality I'm interested in (extensions).

Unfortunately, *everything* working just as it was isn't what I was lookin for, because that includes USB not working properly. I'm really pulling my hair out on this one, because it works perfectly with the live CD. What's the point of having USB that won't hotplug?

Ah well. Any pointers would be great. I'll probably post in the Hardware forum as well and go back to trawling Google.

[marek_online]

Re: Looking for upgrade advice


No! Wait!

Reboots. Amazing things.

Everything's fixed, which means you can chalk my AMD64, NVidia HP Pavillion system up as one perfectly flawless upgrade (at least until I get a chance to check out wireless when I get home this evening, but I don't have any real worries on that front).

Peachy.

[Snowhog]

Re: Looking for upgrade advice

Cool! 8)