On Wed, Dec 19, 2018 at 01:50:06PM -0500, Fred Smith wrote:
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
One more data point: After taking a dd backup of the HD in my Acer Aspire One netbook (screaming 1.6 GHz Atom, dual core!!), I did the 7.5 to 7.6 update and it went perfectly fine, although it had 800 packages to update, so it was kinda slow.
Do any of you know if the various Nvidia issues, and problems upgrading software RAID1 systems have reached resolution? I haven't seen postings here regarding solutions for those problems, and knowing my luck, I would hit both of 'em on my personal desktop.
I didn't see any issues with RAID. I think those problems arise only if you have old RAID devices created with older CentOS releases than 7. Those were probably created with 0.9 metadata version which may be a problem. Currently 1.2 metadata version is created and I didn't see any issues with it.
Maybe others can confirm my conclution.
Regards, Simon