Upgrade 0

Mageia v. 6 with the Plasma Desktop and the Oxygen color scheme.
The wallpaper is from my own library.

I spent time yesterday upgrading my laptop from Mageia v. 5 to Mageia v. 6.

The in-place upgrade did not go well. When it seemed to be done, it displayed a dialog titled “Congratulations,” but all the other text was displayed as those little boxes you get when your LANG setting is not working properly. I clicked one of the buttons and the computer rebooted, but the login screen was off. For example, there were no dialogs other than the “name” and “password” boxes. When I logged, I was in TWM, not Plasma. TWM (Ton’s Window Manager) is the oldest and most primitive Unix/Linus window manager. Here’s a screenshot of TWM:

This happened twice.

I download the *.ISO and booted to it and selected “upgrade.” When I rebooted after the “upgrade” was complete, I was still in TWM.

I ended up downloading the *.ISO file, burning it to disk, and doing a complete reinstall.

Everything seems to be working fine. I have a separate /home directory, so none of my personal data, configuration files, and the like were lost. When I started up the relevant programs, the configuration and data files were still in place.

I remember when I tried an in-place upgrade from v. 3. to v. 4, that broke a few small things, but this was a disaster. However, it was a salvageable disaster.