Those of you who have offered me help in the past may be surprised to learn that, instead of blundering in and installing 12.1 straight off (with appropriate back-ups, of course), I have created a virtual machine on VirtualBox under 11.4 and tried it this way.
It seems to work fine, without any issues, other than the Gnome desktop not liking the graphics adapter and not giving me the full gee-whizz effects of 3.2. KDE has not had any problems so far.
SO…given that it all appears hunky-dory on VB, is it safe to assume that it will work fine if I install it as the main OS? Or could hardware issues still lurk in the system somewhere that VB deals with?
Also, if I decide that Windows has no place on my machine, other than as a virtual disk, are there any special considerations I need to think about when installing 12.1? It looks like being an opportunity to de-clutter and get rid of a lot of legacy “fixes” I’ve made over the years and start again.
Special Considerations: Have a LiveCD ready to go so if something bad happens and you need your computer, you can use your computer. I use Windows as my fail-safe for that day a paper is due and for some reason GRUB goes crazy.
It is not safe to assume that. However, you should be safe installing straight as your main OS. Especially since everything is fine in 11.4 (I’m assuming). However, things could go wrong. But it shouldn’t be anything major. Like I said, have a LiveCD handy.
Well, bull-horns grabbed, 12.1 installed. All went fine - usual niggles about re-installing codecs for VLC, getting the printer to work, setting up the dual monitor etc. But that’s all done.
One problem I have had is with Network Manager. It works on wired mode, but cannot even see the wireless network (Windows on the same machine can). I’ve abandoned Network manager just now (having also tried wicd without luck) and am using the traditional ifup method, which seems fine so far.
So - one happy penguin (who can’t really see much difference so far…!)
You are luckier than I am. Trying to install 12.1 in a virtual box everything seems to go well but then during the installation process the machine (the physical machine that is, not the virtual machine) reboots and I am back to square one…