CentOS - Sep 2006 - Is it better to rebuild or update my notebook for 4.4

Wow!

With all the conversations here, and some things on my system, I am 
seriously thinking of taking another drive, install 4.4 on it, and then 
move my /home partition (I planned for such eventualities by putting 
/home on its own partition).

Couple of questions:

I did my current build with a ks.cfg on a floppy.

    Can I use the same information for 4.4 as I did for 4.3?  That is 
none of the packages are version specific it seems.

    How can I figure out what I have added and add that to my ks.cfg?

       yum listgroup and yum list and compare to the content of ks.cfg?

    Is jre supplied by sun in this release?  I really have a mess with 
Firebird.  It is not recognizing the java plugin.

I am going to go over my install notes again....

Robert Moskowitz wrote:
> Wow!
> 
> With all the conversations here, and some things on my system, I am 
> seriously thinking of taking another drive, install 4.4 on it, and then 
> move my /home partition (I planned for such eventualities by putting 
> /home on its own partition).
Why the rush to upgrade?

I've just installed 4.3, you can safely bet I'm not going to reinstall. 
I will deal with the problems that matter to me, ignore the rest. 
However many problems there have been with 4.4, probably most of them 
don't bite a large proportion of users.
> 
> Couple of questions:
> 
> I did my current build with a ks.cfg on a floppy.
> 
>    Can I use the same information for 4.4 as I did for 4.3?  That is 
> none of the packages are version specific it seems.
Yes. Likely with 5 too (with minor revision to the
packages).
> 
>    How can I figure out what I have added and add that to my ks.cfg?
rpm -qa --last.
> 
>       yum listgroup and yum list and compare to the content of ks.cfg?
> 
>    Is jre supplied by sun in this release?  I really have a mess with 
> Firebird.  It is not recognizing the java plugin.
is it in RHEL? I wouldn't think so. Maybe in an additional
repo.
> 
> I am going to go over my install notes again....
The hardest thing is config changes. rpm -Va can help, but it's not perfect.

If you have/want to have a new drive, clone the system and upgrade the 
clone. If it breaks, you get a chance to try plan b.



btw Assuming USB2 (or the willingness to run it overnight), Knoppix on 
CD is a top way to clone disks. You need a USB2 enclosure; plug it in 
and play away with dd (good if the target's larger and you only want to 
resize the last partition, parted which can do magic stuff and/or ntfs 
utils, ace if you have NTFS partitions.




-- 

Cheers
John

-- spambait
1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu  Z1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu
Tourist pics http://portgeographe.environmentaldisasters.cds.merseine.nu/

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On Sun, 2006-09-03 at 22:57 -0400, Robert Moskowitz
wrote:
> Wow!
> 
> With all the conversations here, and some things on my system, I am 
> seriously thinking of taking another drive, install 4.4 on it, and then 
> move my /home partition (I planned for such eventualities by putting 
> /home on its own partition).
I have had 10 panics since installing 4.4. All "Unable to handle kernel
paging request at virtual address...". Tried using the tricks that
seemed to help on 4.3 discovered by others and a couple by myself. Set
swappiness to 0, disabled swap entirely w/o setting swappiness, disabled
with setting it, enabled swap with swappiness 0, ... am now trying
swappiness 10 and swap enabled.

Sometimes, I'm just in the middle of editing or browsing the forum or
doing mail and rigor-mortise sets in. Eyes swivel left and there are the
dreaded blinking LEDs.

Other times machine is idle (like while I eat dinner) and I touch the
keyboard to wake it up and it does it. I've posted to the list asking if
I should bugz it here or RH or ignore... because I did my googling and
see that the problem is known and unfixed through -15.

I use this unit for workstation only and it is not bleeding edge stuff.
Epox vt8237/kt-880 based (8KRAI PRO model) mobo, radeon (DRI enabled
since having it disabled produce no stability) AMD Athlon PR-2200
(1.8GH), 768MB non-ecc 2.5 CS, no overclocking, dimm voltage +.2v,
memtest86 assures me all is good.

I see no correlation between room temperature, barometric pressures,
time of last dump taken (mine, not the machine's) or any other
environmental factors.
>From watching these lists and the forums, I say if you are a
workstation, just proceed carefully. If you are stable now, may want to
wait. If you do install, have a backup.

I'm doing *nothing* advanced or difficult. Just built this new ws to
replace the prev that had mobo go bad. Just want stability and
reliability. I tell you this only to allay concerns that maybe I'm doing
some weird things to cause this.

The only "non-sanctioned" thing I'm doing is enabling DRI for my
radeon.
It worked fine on <=4.3 and has not affected the frequency or nature of
the OOPS I've experienced.
> 
> <snip stuff that I can't help with>
HTH
--
Bill