i upgraded my laptop to 2010 last friday and spent most of the weekend sort of tweaking things. the laptop has been through many a mandriva upgrade.. so it’s far from a clean slate. i can’t remember certainly but i think i first installed 2008.1 on this laptop then 2009 > 2009.1 > 2010.

crisis #1 – due to my own stupidity…i didn’t check to see how much space i had left in /boot prior to the installation. there wasn’t enough space for the new kernel..so the upgrade finished okay but i could not boot the new kernel. no surprise there. i resolved this by booting my pre-install kernel (thank goodness) and cleaning up /boot and then uninstalling and reinstalling the new kernel. problem was solved.

crisis #2 – the perl installation was upgraded and at least one app was broken by it. i couldn’t run zim, which has become a very important and useful app for me. zim was still referencing perl 5.10.0 and not 5.10.1. turns out this was easily fixed by altering /usr/bin/zim and changing the paths at the top of the file to /usr/bin/perl5.10.1. one further step was needed to get it zim to run which was to empty /tmp. i found this tip here – http://public.sheet.zoho.com/public/anderigs/tux-opensuse11-usage?mode=print. thanks very much to the author.

so far that doesn’t seem like much of a crisis until i admit the other things i tried before coming to the solution..
basically i wiped out /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.10.0. which broke, i think, every perl app. in mandriva the mcc and urpmi are perl tools…
to resolve this disaster i copied all the perl rpms to a USB key and would force a removal of each rpm like so:
rpm -e –nodeps perl-XML-LibXML-Common (for example)
then would reinstall each component again from the USB key. i got urpmi working again and then finally the mcc.

last bad thing is that i’m affected by one of the official errata bugs..seems like it’s always my luck that i get 1-2 of them.
the bug is “USB removable storage devices and internal HD partitions can’t be mounted from Dolphin or Nautilus”, which is preventing non-root users from auto-mounting removable media. which sucks..i haven’t had to manually mount USB keys in a long long long long time. i’m sure it will get resolved in a patch soon.

update 1/23/10: this bug has been resolved by an update to the consolekit package – http://www.mandriva.com/security/advisories?name=MDVA-2010:017

….and now the good things. my sound system works great. virtualbox is awesome. i’ve finally begun migrating my vmware workstation VMs to it. soon as that’s finished i’ll ditch workstation for good. not because it sucks but because vbox is OSS. i threatened to do this a long time ago and now that vbox is version 3.x i’ve decided to do it. also KDE 4.3 is really nice. it took me about 15 minutes to tweak the theme settings and such to get it the way i liked, but the end result was sweet. QT 4.x is very sleek. …and oh yeah i had a post a while back about how i didn’t like that there was no desktop icons in KDE4. in 4.3 at least it was very simple to change the desktop to “folder view” and i got my beloved desktop stuff back. i dont know if that setting existed in previous releases or not. maybe i just missed it.

p.s. don’t install the tomoyo/ccs-tools packages unless you know what you’re doing. if you did anyways..then boot a rescue and delete the related init files from /sbin. don’t ask how i know this…

update 12/4/09: i’m also affected by these bugs – “Using Install & Remove Software (aka rpmdrake) gives an error about missing packages” & “After a fresh install or upgrading to 2010.0 you may see an notification to upgrade to 2009.1”.

update 1/23/10: if totem is crashing immediately then disable visual effects. this bug is also listed in the 2010 errata.