Upgrading to Elyssa: Help and Advice Needed!

[mkeller]

I've been using Daryna for about six months, and I figure it's about time for an upgrade. Daryna works fine for me (except for a couple issues with my ATI graphics driver), but I do a lot of compiling from source, and I'm noticing, more and more frequently, that the libraries in the repositories are becoming outdated.

Which leads to a couple questions. I hear that installing from the CD is better than upgrading online, so that's what I intend to do. But I'd kind of like to leave as much of my system the same, as possible. Not the artwork and things like that, but, well . . . I've got a lot of software installed, much of it built from source. And being faced with having to recompile/reinstall all of it is rather daunting.

Luckily, I've got /home and /usr/local in separate partitions, so everything in them ought to be safe, as long as I don't format them, right? But what about all my libraries and packages and things? Is there some way to automatically reinstall everything I've got installed, now? Or will all the dependencies of the programs I've built be a different version from what I've got now, and require recompilation, anyway?

And is there anything else I ought to know before I begin? And, on a side note, the updated repositories have KDE4 in them, right?

Thanks for any and all help!

[msuggs]

It sounds to me like an upgrade for your system will be a difficult task. If you've comipled many programs from source then yes it is highly likely that some will break and need to be recompiled. The only way to know for sure would be to do it and see. I think when people say that a CD upgrade is most effective, they are talking about doing a clean install as opposed to an upgrade.

Good luck with it all, my belief is that an effective upgrade may not be possible with such a highly customised system as yours. Well, it would be possible but you'll have many problems to fix. If you like that sort of thing then go for it

Some years ago I had a friend who was at least 2 release behind in her Ubuntu system because of the same scenario that you outline. Eventually she dumped it all and went to Arch which suited people like her better due to its progressive update system.

I really love Mint because I don't fiddle with my system to much these days and keep to the defaults but when I played around with it a lot and built from source etc, I used Arch or Gentoo.