hI ALL!
There have been a large enough number of people posting here about difficulties when upgrading from 7. to 7.6 that I'm being somewhat paranoid about it.
I have several machines to upgrade, but so far the only one I've dared to work on (least critical if it goes bad) is my new-to-me-but-used laptop.
First I did a 'dd' backup of the whole drive onto an external USB drive then did the upgrade. Since I use the Mate desktop, I enabled the epel testing repo (per postings on Mate troubles at the time of the upgrade).
Result: Boots to GDM just fine, but Mate is a black screen. Switching to Gnome, works fine, but I can't stand Gnome. Not knowing what else to try I restored the dd backup.
Later I inserted a spare HD and did a new install from the DVD media. This installed without issue, but now no desktop works. Switching to a console (CTRL-ALT-F2) I did a full "yum update", which installed quite a few packages, but upon reboot nothing had improved. So I added the epel repo (and testing) and installed Mate. Ditto, nothing had changed.
This laptop is fairly old, and according to lshw, has a RV635/M86 [Mobility Radeon HD 3650]I] video chipset, in case it matters. CPU is identified as: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T9400 @ 2.53GHz
Having previously installed 7.5 on it without trouble, on which Mate works just fine, I wonder what could have become so broken that neither an upgrade nor a fresh install works.
I have, as I said, several other machines to upgrade, too, some of them have Nvidia grahics (esp. my main desktop box, which also uses Linux software RAID-1) and all run Mate. Then there is a netbook (low priority) a couple of VMs (in virtualbox) and at work several other VMS as well as bare-metal on a Lenovo deskside machine, and I'm afraid to do an update on all of them because I need them to be in usable condition. The Lenovo box in my office is somewhat urgent, as I am about to retire and turn it over to someone else who doesn't know much about Linux.
I'd appreciate any advice I can get on how to get these systems upgraded without breaking them.
thanks in advance for your help!
Fred