Today I upgraded a Red Hat 8 installation to Red Hat 9, normally easy enough, but I had the Ximian desktop installed on 8, I'm fond of it, I've been using it every day for a month, and I didn't want to lose it. I did want the new features of RH 9 - the improved USB auto detect, for one thing. The Red Hat installer spotted Ximian: it gave me a 'this could make your system unstable if you proceed' message, but I noted that it had spotted the upadted Gnome packages, and had chosen, all by itself, not to overwrite them.

It took about an hour to install - I have a very slow, older CD RW drive installed on the machine in question - but, after install, up came my Ximian desktop, email and browser favorites intact. Even my desktop image and screensaver choices had survived. Bravo.

Last week, I had to upgrade my Windows 2000 pro partition to XP to participate in a beta program for a very cool new app that a friend at Adobe is working on. Gotta say the experience wan't much different - and I had more problems with XP post-install than Red Hat, including a hang after I installed a new fast video card. Red hat detected it and re-configured automatically - and told me what it was doing. XP just crashed. Red Hat, BTW, shows rather better performance on the new card with its own drivers than XP did with MS drivers...
Comments 8:14:19 PM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures