kde upgrades = risks, hassles, annoyances.

[Basil Fowler]

I have explained myself badly.

I keep the basic distribution stable, but update individual items (such as 
KDE) as needed. Over time, things get out of sync (see next paragraph).  When 
this happens, I go for a major update with a clean reinstallation from a 
current distro. An rpm update will overwrite files.  This is rarely done 100% 
accurately.  

I have an old 200 MHz box that I use as an remote X terminal.  It uses SuSE 
8.0 and runs very satisfactorily as such.  I wanted to put some basic 
applications on so that it could be used as a stand-alone computer. However, 
when I installed Firefox, it would not work because the glibc libraries were 
out of date.  Trying to updating the glibc libraries caused a raft of broken 
dependencies.   So I shall probably install a copy of Mandrake 9.2, which 
will be far less hassle than trying to update the individual packages.

As a general rule, I do a full reinstall every two years or so - that is not a 
very big deal in my view.  Most Windows reinstallations are forced - my Linux 
reinstallations are planned and done as and when I please. As an aside I run 
Windows 98SE as an application using Win4Lin.  As an application it is rock 
steady - it takes about 15 seconds to start.  The Windows installation has 
been untouched for years.

I run Mandrake 9.2 - it came with KDE 3.1.  I am now running KDE 3.3.1.  I 
have done about 4 to 5 KDE upgrades over the past 18 months since I installed 
Mandrake 9.2.

KDE is so complex, that I find it much better to build the next version as 
described and put in its own directory.  I then have the choice of the two 
versions - and most importantly - the old version remains untouched.  The way 
I work means that the old version is never overwritten, and remains 
available.  I used the same technique when I upgraded the qt libraries.  To 
swap from one to the other, all I needed to do was to change a symlink.

I always expect trouble somewhere when going from KDE 3.x to 3.x+1.  The 
formats for the files in .kde tend to change, and this can lead to 
malfunctions. This is the reason why I recommend having a clean .kde 
directory for the new version of KDE.  Many times have I encountered problems 
with a program and found that on switching user accounts, the problem goes 
away, which pinpoints the cause as a fault in the $HOME directory, rather 
than a vice in the program itself.

Hope this helps

Basil Fowler


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