Re: Long standing trouble installing x86_64

On 6/15/05, Nick Davis <[email protected]> wrote:
> To be honest with you, I'd never expect one distro to be able to install over the
> other, unless the new distro was based off of the old one quite recently with few
> changes. Not all distros use the same location for files, nor the same method of
> configuring things.. I'd expect it NOT to work as your case shows.

Strangely enough the exact opposite is true. I've been able to install
over redhat and preserve many of the legacy bits from the old install.
The further apart things are, the more likely you'l get a sucessful
overwrite. Dependancies are real easy to resolve when everything
coming in is newer than the old. Between 10.1 and FC 3 there's some
version overlap that threw urpmi into a tizzy.
 
> In an ideal world all distros would use the same package management, same file name,
> same location, same everything.. but that is a long way away if ever.

Frankly, I expected less deference from the Mandrake installer. When I
say "Install over top" I bloody mean it :)
 
> The Mandriva "install" method should/would have worked if you would have told it to
> format the partitions before installing the packages (the same as deleting the files
> yourself).

Sure, If I had no need to preserve my home directory that would be
easy. I typically start from a clean HDD whenever installing a linux
machine.
 
> The reason clearing the rpm database won't work is because the rpm system checks for
> certain files in the system before/during/after installing rpms. So if you have Fedora
> versions of files, the rpm system will see that and assume the necessary files are
> there. This is where havoc will begin.. because those Fedora files are probably not
> compatable with the ones Mandrake needs.
> 
> Try installing Fedora over Mandrake once without formatting.. I'd be interested to
> know if that works.. I'm skeptical at most.

Dunno, I don't ever want to run FC on my desktop again. Hence my
willingness to explore this for days on end (download burn boot repeat
). Going the other way would be anathema.
 
> The only changes I'd recommend you make to Mandriva is ask for them to modify the
> installer to delete all of the system files and configs if a person is requesting to
> install Mandrive over some other distro.

There's another change that would be nice; expected behavior such as
this should be known up front. I would have hapily performed the
deletion three months ago had I known what the problem was.
 
> Now I'm not trying to piss you off here or make you look bad, I'm just stating facts
> and hopefully trying to clear up why you were seeing problems.
 
I'm all better now... You''d have to try harder to piss me off or make
me look bad. I've been a happy Mandrake user for a very long time.
This is the first time I've run into this sort of problem and I
thought I'd bring it up in the community that might have a chance to
change things.

I'm already in communication with the support team because the bad
part of all this was that my support incident fell between some crack
in their system.

Ideally, I would have gotten 10.1 on the box when I bought it, but
that's between Pogo and Mandriva.

I'm now writing you from my very happy Pogo workstation.