If I install 11.1 Beta 5 KDE 4 will it be updated/upgraded online to the finished version of 11.1 ? Or should I wait and install just the finished version of 11.1? Thanks for any help.
It can be upgraded online but obviously being BETA it will need more bug squashing.
I’ve been using 11.1 for daily use since beta 4. Yes you can upgrade it from beta to RC to final without needing to download the cd’s. I’ve been running it on KDE 4.1.7… (4.2) Which I am just loving far better than 4.1.3, and I am finding it very stable. Kmail is looking sexy, and the notifications are looking more complete with the system.
It really depends on you. I find it stable enough, but it did require some tweaking (especially if you have newer hardware), and some quirks still need ironing out (network manager plasmoid kills my plasma workspace, SSL not working for google talk).
For me it’s quite stabe and usable, but I feel some additional hammering is still needed until I switch back to suse as my main os.
On a side note: although it is possible to “ride the updates” from beta to release, I would anyway suggest a clean install when the final is out. You simply can never know exactly what changed where, and a bad “left-over” config file can really cause much pain. (Just my two cents 
)
Don’t expect too much stability for KDE4 in 11.1 beta 5.
As I wrote in a former entry, after about 6-8 hours real working in beta 5 after setting parameters I got the crash message:
“KDE-crashman. : schwerer Fehler, plasma crashed, signal 11”
and after reboot a blank screen with only a single Dolphin window …
KDE4 in beta 5 is much more stable than in 11.0 and looking promising, but it’s still more at alpha test level.
With my usual work load in KDE4 for 11.0 I got no stable interval of 1 hour.
It would be fine to get a KDE4 on 11.1 showing really beta test performance.
( In stable systems like 10.3 I’m typically working some month without logout, in somewhat unsettled system like 11.0/KDE3 some days or hours between reboots depending on the type of work.
To use a 10.3, but with the newest GIMP/ufraw, would be a better alternative for me. )
Actually… I also experienced a lot of odd things in KDE 4 and instability, artifacts and all kind of things and was also thinking, that “gee… still feels like alpha”… but after installing the Nvidia beta driver everything runs much much smoother… so I’m starting to think that most of the issues concerning KDE 4 on my laptop is due to bad graphics driver and not because of KDE. (of course KDE has it’s own problems as well).
**
Beta 5 was running real smooth for me until yesterday. When I rebooted, I lost the left side icons on the task bar and the others were spread way out – not yet stable enough for a production system IMHO.
Working fine for me. I have ditched 10.0 and am running the latest alpha 11.1 on my main machine.
The only two problems that I have are that (as yet) usb hard drives (using ntfs) can’t yet be read and that I can’t get install audiokonverter (from packman) as it complains about kde3-minetype-flv missing. Which is a bit strange as flv (flash movies) automatically open with vlc and play fine.
In one word: NO.
It can be, but I don’t recommend it. You may have config files associated with a version that was less stable. You will never know what might be in there, causing strange behaviour. Even though I test beta versions, I always re-install the Gold Mastered version.
You should WAIT.
IMHO only 4 types of users should be using the beta:
a. the developers,
b. the packagers,
c. the testers
d. those who have no other choice because the beta has drivers/kernel versions that are not available in earlier versions.
If I want to live dangerously, which repos should I use to upgrade from 11.0 to 11.1 beta5?
I have searched the forum and found a couple of threads that list what must be some, but not all of the necessary repos since I can’t get around a couple stubborn dependency issues.
I am trying to upgrade an old, low-spec, machine. It doesn’t seem to have enough memory to do an install from the live CD. It doesn’t have a DVD drive to install that way. I have a usb DVD drive that is set as the first boot device in the BIOS. However, it won’t boot the machine although it did boot a laptop and installed beta5 to the laptop.
Never tried an internet install. If that is an option, could someone walk me through it? I’m not opposed to a clean install. I just can’t seem to do it.
add
e. the adventurous
f the patient
Wow, this is a helpful forum isn’t it. Thanks for all your help guys. Ok, I read all the post and I think I’ll wait for Dec. 18th for the finished version.
Prexy I also have an old computer. AMI BIOS dated 1999, 256 Mgs of RAM, 1.2 GH AMD Athlon CPU, ATI All-in-wonder 128 Pro vid card with 32 Mgs of RAM, 20X internal DVD burner. The only distros I can’t run are Fedora 9, FreeBSD, PC-BSD, CentOS and OpenSolaris. There might be others. I haven’t tried everything out there. Linux Mint should work for you.
Index of /factory/repo/oss
and
Index of /factory/repo/non-oss
Add those as yast-sources & hit the upgrade button.
My favorite way is to add those as yast-sources & untick any others
then in a terminal as root
“zypper ref”
then
“zypper dup”
Although I recommend a clean install from the DVD.
Have fun:)
I have a bit more powerful machine that I tried to install 11.1 Beta5. It won’t install properly. All that I saved was /home partition. I can’t get the boot menu to work properly. But that is another story.
I updated to 11.1 on my laptop and now I can’t connect to the internet. But that is a story for another thread.
BTW, all these machines ran 11.0 pretty nicely.
The graphics driver may be a main cause for problems in 11.1 beta 5, eventually starting with troubles with sax2.
But using 11.0 up to now I had no problems with the linux native 3D graphics driver (I didn’t really use 3D up to now).
I’ll never go back to ATI drivers!! With my Radeon X600 card I had plenty of troubles, some weeks of work at level 3, trial, crash, and halloween including emergency cutout of the screen, even to set up any working screen graphic after SuSE 9.3 installation.
Even the very first 2D linux native driver was an unbelievable relief.
I feel for your sentiment. I’ve just purchased a laptop, deliberately selecting ATI drivers, in the full knowledge that I will have lots of software heartburn in setups.
But the nVidia hardware (while in many respects faster than ATI) is no panacia. nVidia cards are reported to have major quality problems in terms of overheating. This purportedly effects the entire nVidia 8000 and 9000 series of graphic cards. And its not as if the card just fails … no it gets warm, overheats, and then strange (initially minor) graphic effects start happening, gradually deteriorating over a period of time, which can be short, or very long. One simply does not know. Nvidia set aside a massive amount of money (somewhere between $150,000 million and $180,000 million US) to deal with returns/financial-charges associated with this major problem. Now there is a reasonable chance you will be lucky and never see this problem. But you might, and it will be a real hair puller if it happens.
wrt ATI drivers, this only affects Linux. But the nVidia problem affects both Linux and Windows and MacIntosh. So from our home PC perspective where my wife and I dual boot to a laptop (she to windows and me to Linux) it makes more sense to go with the ATI approach. A graphic chipset failure when on the road would be disastrous. But with bad drivers, one in an emergency can boot to another OS.
Thanks a bunch for that tidbit, oldcpu! I have been considering a new video card for sometime now and probably would have gone nVidia if it weren’t for your comment. I had always thought of them as the “real” video cards, but if what you say still stands, I’ll stick with ATI. I’ve beaten ATI cards before, I can do it again.
And thanks all for this thread, I just got a new PC and was wondering whether to install 11.0 or 11.1 beta (and just ride the Factory repo till release day). I don’t really want to wait for release before using the new machine, though. What do you guys think about upgrading from 11.0 to 11.1 via the “Upgrade” option during installation? I hear that it’s much nicer now that you can enable your third-party repos for the installation (Pacman, VLC, etc).
Its for sure a beta, and has some serious flaws. I for one cant use Openoffice. I also has some network flaws. Its easy enough to use both on a dual boot, have 11.0 and 11.1. I wouldn’t consider shifting production to 11.1 yet.
It can certainly be done, but, I don’t recommend it. When starting a production install, make it a clean install. We don’t want any leftover lurkies – rpms get changed & merged, ergo the config files get confused among themselves.
Why not do both. For example, I have 11.0 as my production install and 11.1 beta 5 as a separate install for playing with the latest & greatest. I can always get to the other’s /home by assigning it a mount point during the partitioning setup like /data1. etc. & looking at it in “My Computer”.
I do the update routine in 11.1 until GM and then when the boxed version comes out, I’ll replace 11.0 with a production 11.1 – another clean install. And, what had been 11.1 Beta throuth GM will become 11.3 Alpha as soon as it’s available.
And so it goes.
Have fun:)
And maybe lastly add
g for the impatient
Just wait for a month and all is well probably with 11.1