Monday, May 04, 2009

Upgrading Mandriva to 2009.1

(Beware, this is fairly hardcore geekery, but do read the link to the Mandriva release!)
Since my last upgrade a newer version of Mandriva has been released - last week - and this time I decided to be less conservative and do an early upgrade - I normally wait at least a month for the bugs to be ironed out!
Again I tried it on another machine before upgrading the email server - so I found out that it would be good to remove kdelibs-common
urpme kdelibs-common
which gets rid of any remaining traces of kde3, before starting the upgrade - where I largely followed this procedure adding a --noclean to the urpmi command to prevent deletion of the downloaded files so that I could use them to upgrade machine two. Note, those are the instructions for a 2008 to 2009 upgrade, but the procedure is the same.
Once complete I had two issues, googling solved them, but let me quote them here, with links to the helpful pages:
  • Initially the X server would not start and I had to reboot into safe mode as I couldn't switch to a dumb virtual terminal. I disabled the nvidia driver and ignored that for the moment
  • Once I got to the login screen I found that neither the mouse nor the keyboard worked! Fortunately I had another machine to websearch and found this, so these two commands and a reboot (not really necessary but just to check:
    chkconfig --del messagebus
    chkconfig --add messagebus
    gets the messagebus running at the correct point in the boot process.
  • I then tried getting the nvidia graphics card working - with the default driver various fancy graphics apps fail to run. I'd been getting the following:

    (II) NVIDIA(0): Initialized GART.

    Backtrace:
    0: /etc/X11/X(xorg_backtrace+0x37) [0x8135f97]
    1: /etc/X11/X(xf86SigHandler+0x56) [0x80cca26]
    2: [0xffffe400]
    3: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//nvidia_drv.so [0xb7074c48]

    Fatal server error:
    Caught signal 11. Server aborting

    Again I found a bug report here. Adding 'nopat' to the options in /boot/grub/menu.lst also solved the problem for me

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