That’s why I decided to upgrade my existing installation of Mageia KDE from version 1 to version 2.
To be honest, I was slightly scared by the previous not-so-good experience of a Mageia upgrade described by Gene on his ERACC blog. The second option for me would be to make a fresh install, which I could always revert to. I had so little to lose that the decision was easily made.
There is a detailed how-to guide for this on the official Mageia Wiki, and that was what I used.
The upgrade process
The Mageia upgrade program found about 1500 packages to upgrade on my laptop.
The full upgrade cycle took just under one hour to download and install new versions of the packages.
Mageia had asked no questions during the upgrade. It just took its time, computer and bandwidth resources.
Finally, the upgrade was over.
It was the time to reboot and see the results.
First boot
As you may know, I have 4 systems installed in parallel on my laptop. Debian is the system that manages the GRUB2 bootloader. It was a tricky thing to get Mageia’s bootloader properly propagated into GRUB2, and I was afraid that the old method would not work in Mageia 2.
It worked. (Sigh)
GRUB2 successfully started the Mageia 2 KDE without requiring any changes at all.
However, the system itself had changed. These changes were visible from the start: the splash screen now had the Mageia 2's background image, the one I had seen in my Live run.
The changes
Once booted, I noted some other changes in Mageia 2 compared to version 1.
- Most notable of them was the change in configuration of my QuickLaunch panel. It changed from 2-line to 1-line layout, thus extending Quicklaunch to almost the whole bottom panel. Also, Quicklaunch moved from the left corner to the right.
- Keyboard layout indicator was switched from flag-only to flag+label mode.
- Most annoying was the wrong colour theme of Google Chrome. For some reason, the control elements like opening of a new tab and maximizing the window disappeared, and red squares were in their place. It made me have to re-install the browser, to be precise to separately and manually upgrade it. That was not bad, because I was too lazy for quite a long time and stayed with Chrome 16 up until now. It is Chrome 19 already in my system.
- The windows decoration theme was switched in Mageia 2 from the deep-blue one, which I liked in Mageia 1, to more standard Oxygen. I'll need to cope with it now, which is not a big deal. But maybe somebody knows how to switch to the old Mageia 1 style?
- The firewall initially showed lots more warnings about different services' connection. It was quite annoying, but gradually that issue has disappeared with time.
- Unfortunately, I had to revert from the default Icon-only Task Manager in Mageia 2 to the classical Task Manager, because I need to see a window title for my GMail inbox: I have a number of unread messages there. That was an annoying issue for me in Unity and GNOME3 in Ubuntu. Mageia 2 is better in these terms, because it gives me a choice.
- GIMP is now version 2.8 in Mageia 2, which allows the use of a single-window interface.
- Stangely enough, Flash player was removed from the installation. Neither Firefox nor Chrome were able to play flash videos until I installed the Flash player package from the Mageia repository.
- LibreOffice is now version 3.5.3.
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| Mageia 2 KDE with installed Google Chrome and Flash player |
Conclusion
My previous experience of an upgrade was with Xubuntu, which I changed from version 11.10 to 12.04. It was a very good experience.
In my experience, Mageia 2 set a new record of how the upgrade should happen. It was smooth and almost silky.
Have you tried to upgrade to Mageia 2? How did it go for you? Have you faced any issues in this process?
Or, you have not tried Mageia at all yet? That’s my recommendation to try it! If you don’t know how to prepare a CD yourself, let Buy Linux CDs site help you! Your disk will be delivered to your mailbox anywhere in the world.
Video used in the screenshot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hi4pKP8NBpE
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