Migration season has started

After finishing with all the work this term, including written reports, oral reports in meetings, and two rather risky academic presentations in a Congress (described here by Megatotoro), I can take some free time at last.

Of course, after the crazy rush, I ended a little weak.  But my wife made me an offer I could not refuse: she has been using Mandriva 2009.2 on her Toshiba satellite laptop all this time and wanted me to help her migrate it to a more updated system.

I remember that I had unsuccessfully tried to install Mandriva 2010 Adelie, 2010.1 Farman, and 2010.2 Christmas.  There were some issues with the graphic server.

She asked me to try Mageia 2.  Unfortunately, when I booted this distro from a USB drive,I hit the same problem.

Then, it occurred to me that I had not tried Mageia 1.  I know Mageia 1 has already gone EOL, but I decided to give it a try anyways.

It worked.  Mageia 1 picked up everything: wi-fi, function keys, graphic server, sound, and effects.  But the best part was that my wife's user-defined desktop preferences stayed after installing because I did not format the home partition.

I am going to try to run an upgrade to Mageia 2 later.
UPDATE:  Mageia 1 offered me the possibility to upgrade to Mageia 2.  Although I normally prefer to do clean installs, I accepted and, after a couple hours, my wife was using her brand new Mageia 2 OS.

What comes next is to decide on a system to migrate my desktop.  But I will wait a bit longer because I want to try the next Mandriva release.