Upgrading to Mandrake 10
Last night I decided to upgrade my home Linux box, which was running Mandrake 9.2, to the newly-released Mandrake 10.
I run Mandrake at home, and until recently, on my work machine, too. Now at work I run Red Hat 9, but only because we use ClearCase (don't get me started) as our version control software, and it patches into the kernel, and only supports Red Hat. So I was forced (kicking and screaming) to switch to Red Hat at work.
Now, this is just my personal opinion, and I'm sure I'll get flak for it, but Mandrake beats Red Hat for ease-of-installation and use. Not by a whole lot, but enough that I perfer Mandrake. My upgrade to Mandrake 10 is a good example of what I'm talking about.
Mandrake has not yet released the ISO files of the 'official' version of Mandrake 10, as they want their preferred (read that, paying) customers to be able to get it first. But you can get 'official' Mandrake 10 if you are willing to follow a few simple steps.
- First, find a Mandrake mirror site. I used raven.cslab.vt.edu.
- Using any modern browser that lets you access an ftp site, go to the directory containing the official Mandrake 10 release, which on that site was '/pub/linux/mandrakelinux/official/10.0/i586'. Then go into the 'images' subdirectory.
- Download 'boot.iso', and burn it to a CD.
- Using your existing Mandrake 9.2 installation, write down the following information: system name, system domain, system IP address, DNS IP address, gateway IP address (if you use a gateway to access the internet)
- Insert the CD you just burned, and reboot your system so that it boots from the CD
- A Mandrake 10 special boot loader will come up. It will ask you for the info I had you write down, including the location of the ftp site and the directory for the Mandrake 10 source. Use the raven site from above.
- If you have broadband, it will spend almost 3 hours downloading Mandrake 10. If you are on a dial-up, this may take all night. Fire up your Windoze game machine and play 'Splinter Cell' for a while.
- Once the download is done, the installer will walk you through the normal installation steps. Tell it you are upgrading an existing system. It will recognize all of your current drives, partitions, setting, everything.
- Done. You now have a Mandrake 10 system.
Once Mandrake does the wide release of Mandrake 10, installation will be even easier. Find a site hosting the ISO files, download them using Bittorrent, burn the CDs, reboot from CD1, and off you go. But the fact that I can do a full upgrade over the Internet using only the steps I gave above, with no problems what so ever... well, bravo to Mandrake.
Oh, and Mandrake 10 comes with Python 2.3.3.
10:43:36 AM 
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