Comments on: Upgrading to Mandriva 2009.1 http://colin.guthr.ie/2009/05/upgrading-to-mandriva-2009-1/ Illegitimi non carborundum Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:14:02 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: Guy Bormann http://colin.guthr.ie/2009/05/upgrading-to-mandriva-2009-1/comment-page-1/#comment-184 Guy Bormann Sun, 11 Oct 2009 21:08:35 +0000 #comment-184 Oh, oh, I really have to add a last remark. Don't change the group of any users you add during install to a group id below 500. It might further complicate the permission problems for dbus/haldaemon and their clients' access to them. If one likes to add users to a local sharing group, do it after the first regular boot into the new system. (I don't understand the use of user-centric groups. Maybe it is meant to be an additional security layer for users unfamiliar with UNIX permission masks and management.) Guy PS: I'll stop hi-jacking your blog now :-P (And, most of the issues might have been ironed out anyway since the latest batch of updates!!) Oh, oh, I really have to add a last remark.
Don’t change the group of any users you add during install to a group id below 500. It might further complicate the permission problems for dbus/haldaemon and their clients’ access to them. If one likes to add users to a local sharing group, do it after the first regular boot into the new system.
(I don’t understand the use of user-centric groups. Maybe it is meant to be an additional security layer for users unfamiliar with UNIX permission masks and management.)

Guy
PS: I’ll stop hi-jacking your blog now :-P
(And, most of the issues might have been ironed out anyway since the latest batch of updates!!)

]]> By: Guy Bormann http://colin.guthr.ie/2009/05/upgrading-to-mandriva-2009-1/comment-page-1/#comment-183 Guy Bormann Sun, 11 Oct 2009 20:32:52 +0000 #comment-183 Hi Colin, Spent the better part of the afternoon to get it up and running again. Doing a pure DVD-based __re__-install cured all problems : root on LVM, haldaemon service starts (I had a suspicion it was a permissions issue; it was and it was triggered by a lingering buggy update), pulseaudio starts, png loader sig in the gdk-pixbuf config, no more permission nags in GNOME, ... After a regular boot, doing the updates is harmless, including the recommended kernel security update. So, apparently the fine-tuned install procedure doesn't mix well with the intrusion of update packages. As an aside : I tasted some of the improved stability of the 2.6.29 kernel flavour after a first install. An upgrade was not save but the install tried to retain as much info of the 2008.0 version as possible. Due to a trigger-happy touchpad the updates got install while I didn't get the chance to change anything in the final config summary phase (except timezone settings, network and graphics drv). Booting was still possible, probably because I didn't touch the bootloader settings. Once I figured out something was really screwed with the permissions (especially the dbus ones; there are many related bug reports for various distributions), I tried to reinstall, first by doing an upgrade 2009.1->2009.1 (hey, I can't help it was suggested by the installer) but it didn't solve the non-fatal issues. Then I did complete reinstalls (keeping the partitionmount point mappings), but always with updates, with the aggravation of a booting problem after the first reboot. For some reason I didn't trust the updates (I remember seeing a timestamped dbus rpm while the one on the DVD medium had no timestamp; there was a serious permission problem with a dbus launch helper), so I decided to do an install without defining any distro mirror and update source. And here we are again :-) : ALL ISSUES SOLVED, including the boot problem. Obviously, on my machine this is an Errata for 2009.1. The problem is : I didn't keep record of all my trial and error work and I didn't save all the intermediate install reports :-( So, I'm afraid I can't write for the wiki. But I'll get on the Forum. There are people with boot problems on RAID+LVM combo's with similar symptoms. I will just wait for the release of 2010 although I don't like .0 releases (I had issues with 2007.0 on my desktop and 2008.0 on this laptop) that got hammered out in the .1 releases, and later the .0 updates (took those instead :-) Sorry for the long comment but this might be helpful to other and your blog shows up on Google :-) Bye, Guy Hi Colin,

Spent the better part of the afternoon to get it up and running again. Doing a pure DVD-based __re__-install cured all problems : root on LVM, haldaemon service starts (I had a suspicion it was a permissions issue; it was and it was triggered by a lingering buggy update), pulseaudio starts, png loader sig in the gdk-pixbuf config, no more permission nags in GNOME, …
After a regular boot, doing the updates is harmless, including the recommended kernel security update. So, apparently the fine-tuned install procedure doesn’t mix well with the intrusion of update packages.

As an aside : I tasted some of the improved stability of the 2.6.29 kernel flavour after a first install. An upgrade was not save but the install tried to retain as much info of the 2008.0 version as possible. Due to a trigger-happy touchpad the updates got install while I didn’t get the chance to change anything in the final config summary phase (except timezone settings, network and graphics drv). Booting was still possible, probably because I didn’t touch the bootloader settings.
Once I figured out something was really screwed with the permissions (especially the dbus ones; there are many related bug reports for various distributions), I tried to reinstall, first by doing an upgrade 2009.1->2009.1 (hey, I can’t help it was suggested by the installer) but it didn’t solve the non-fatal issues. Then I did complete reinstalls (keeping the partitionmount point mappings), but always with updates, with the aggravation of a booting problem after the first reboot.
For some reason I didn’t trust the updates (I remember seeing a timestamped dbus rpm while the one on the DVD medium had no timestamp; there was a serious permission problem with a dbus launch helper), so I decided to do an install without defining any distro mirror and update source. And here we are again :-) : ALL ISSUES SOLVED, including the boot problem.

Obviously, on my machine this is an Errata for 2009.1. The problem is : I didn’t keep record of all my trial and error work and I didn’t save all the intermediate install reports :-( So, I’m afraid I can’t write for the wiki. But I’ll get on the Forum. There are people with boot problems on RAID+LVM combo’s with similar symptoms. I will just wait for the release of 2010 although I don’t like .0 releases (I had issues with 2007.0 on my desktop and 2008.0 on this laptop) that got hammered out in the .1 releases, and later the .0 updates (took those instead :-)

Sorry for the long comment but this might be helpful to other and your blog shows up on Google :-)

Bye,

Guy

]]> By: Colin http://colin.guthr.ie/2009/05/upgrading-to-mandriva-2009-1/comment-page-1/#comment-172 Colin Sun, 11 Oct 2009 11:25:36 +0000 #comment-172 Bummer you had such a bad experience :( Has to be said, that other than the issues I encountered and documented, this upgrade was pretty smooth. Certainly not as bad as the last time round! Hopefully the 2009.1 -> 2010.0 will be smoother. It's due out soon, so I'd recommend you jump straight to the RC2 released yesterday. Bummer you had such a bad experience :( Has to be said, that other than the issues I encountered and documented, this upgrade was pretty smooth. Certainly not as bad as the last time round! Hopefully the 2009.1 -> 2010.0 will be smoother. It’s due out soon, so I’d recommend you jump straight to the RC2 released yesterday.

]]> By: Guy Bormann http://colin.guthr.ie/2009/05/upgrading-to-mandriva-2009-1/comment-page-1/#comment-171 Guy Bormann Sun, 11 Oct 2009 08:59:39 +0000 #comment-171 hi Colin, in my case the LVM issue made my laptop unbootable (after the wait I get a kernel panick). It looks like I have to split my /boot partition (1GB) in 2 (1 /boot, the other /) to make it bootable again. Let's not mention the haldaemon service issues, the fundamental config error of the 64bit version of gdk-pixbuf (no loader entry for .png!), pulseaudio failure, ... This is my worst install experience with Mandrakelinux/Mandriva (a user since 2000) ever. BTW, my machine is an HP Pavillion laptop (dv6158eu). Guy hi Colin, in my case the LVM issue made my laptop unbootable (after the wait I get a kernel panick). It looks like I have to split my /boot partition (1GB) in 2 (1 /boot, the other /) to make it bootable again. Let’s not mention the haldaemon service issues, the fundamental config error of the 64bit version of gdk-pixbuf (no loader entry for .png!), pulseaudio failure, … This is my worst install experience with Mandrakelinux/Mandriva (a user since 2000) ever.

BTW, my machine is an HP Pavillion laptop (dv6158eu).

Guy

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