upgrade vs re-install

[dr_te_z]

In my early linux-days I bought SuSE6.3. Later I obtained version 6.4 and later 7.x and so on. In that time I found out that SuSE allows you to upgrade you running system, but doing so never seemed to suppy you with a stable system. Just "format c:" & fresh install gave better results.

Just wondering: are there heroes out there running a smooth, stable and up-to-date linux system which started as a 2.2 kernel with ext2 KDE1 and so on?

Or do we all do a fresh-install from time to time?

[mrBen]

I've been running Debian for a while - started on a 2.4.18 kernel, now on 2.6.5 - apt-get upgrade generally makes things a lot easier than reinstalling, and it's not as if they release new releases of Debian that often.

Generally with other distros the plan was to keep /home on a seperate partition, which makes reinstalling a lot less painful.

[Choozo]

Just completed an update of Mandrake from 9.2 -> 10.0 on my Dell Latitude laptop, which seems to be a raving success so far! :D

Reinstalling the nVIDIA drivers was also a breeze after I found driver file(s) compatible with the 2.6.x kernel here (http://www.sh.nu/download/nvidia/linux-2.6/) (NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-5328-pkg0.run) :cool:

Previously I always did a clean reinstall (keeping /home) due to the aforementioned problems that you generally end up with, but Mandrake at least seems to have this under control now.

Cheers :)

[X_console]

With Gentoo I generally just run emerge -UD world every now and then. But when 2004.1 came out, I decided to go for a total reinstall.

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by Choozo
Reinstalling the nVIDIA drivers was also a breeze after I found driver file(s) compatible with the 2.6.x kernel here (http://www.sh.nu/download/nvidia/linux-2.6/) (NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-5328-pkg0.run) *psst!* The latest standard nVidia drivers work with 2.6!

http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_ia32_1.0-5336.html

;)