Migration stories 3: Good Bye, Mandriva 2010.2!

MIGRATION STORIES, part 3

While my wife's migration was very successful, mine was not a smooth process.  But I know that is bound to happen when you change OSs.  

A.  Mandriva 2011
The day was yesterday.  I've been using Mandriva 2010.2 (Xmas) as the main OS of my desktop.  However, now that I finally reconciled with the Rosa SimpleWelcome, stack folders and rocket launcher, I decided that I wanted to try Mandriva 2011 as the replacement.  To this end, I looked for my Mandriva 2011 DVDs.  The Mandriva 2011 Desktop Live DVD has given my some performance issues in the past, so I settled for the PowerPack edition.

Inspired by my recent success with Mageia 2, I decided that I was not going to format my /home partition.

But this time the change did not go as smoothly as I had expected; I got a message indicating that one installation transaction was not complete.  I continued with the process anyway and, after installing the new distro, I saw that Mandriva 2011 would boot in a sluggish way.  I assumed that it was because of the indexing of all the files I had accumulated in two years, but I knew something had gone wrong.  First, for indexing, the user has to activate Nepomuk once the desktop loads and I hadn't gotten to my desktop yet.  Second, once the log in was complete, there was a bad problem with the graphical server: I had no visible desktop.  It seems that my previous user configuration (Kwin effects) and the new one were overlapping, so the Rocket bar was a real mess.

I gave it another try wiping everything this time.  That solved the problem of the misbehaving graphical server.  I tested sound, video, and the printer; everything seemed fine.  That was until I tried to activate the desktop effects: Mandriva 2011 would not refresh the desktop, so it was basically impossible to work.  I checked the graphical server and found out that, despite the proprietary drivers for my video card were installed, the card was not working correctly.  So, that was my option: Mandriva 2011 was fully operational without desktop effects...which I happen to be very fond of.

I tried the whole thing again using the Mandriva 2012 TP "Bernie Lomax".  Of course, I  know that using such a system as one's production OS is far from advisable, but I wanted to see it running on real hardware.  It ran beautifully, but the problem with the effects persisted.

B.  Mageia 2
Since Mandriva 2011 was not working with me, I placed a Mageia 2 installation DVD on the tray and began the installation.  As usual, this distro did everything it was meant to and in a matter of 45 minutes Mandriva 2011 had been replaced by Mageia 2.

I tested the effects.  They were working, but not to their full power.  For example, when one manually rotates the cube, it gets stuck. Grrr.

 But some effects looked better than no effects, I concluded.  However, I discovered one unexpected problem: the multifunctional printer.  My Epson Stylus TX200 was recognized as a printer, but not as a scanner.

Mandriva 2011 had no problems seeing it and configuring.  Mageia, on the other hand, lacked the drivers for scanning with it.  So, I had to go online to hunt for the appropriate drivers from the manufacturer's page.  That is not a great deal, but it reminded me of my Windows times.

Finally, I got the scanner working and looked at my new Mageia 2 desktop.  I still felt some nostalgia for the gone-too-soon Mandriva 2011 system...


And then I installed Mandriva 2011 back using another partition.  You see, that's the beauty of Linux: you can work with multiple systems if you feel like it.

So, right now I'm using the following OSs:
Desktop: Mageia 2, Mandriva 2011PowerPack, Pardus 2011
Laptop: PCLinuxOS, Mageia 2, Mandriva 2011 Desktop
Netbook: Mandriva 2010.2, Mepis 11, Mageia 2, Mandriva 2011 Desktop, and Pardus 2011.

I'm still waiting to see Mageia 3 and the new iterations of Mandriva and Pardus.  I just gave Rosa Desktop Fresh a run and I must say that it is very good, by the way.