Upgrade to Spring

Yesterday in a fit of mind I decided to upgrade to Mandriva latest release.
The steps included
- backing up .kde, .kderc, .qt, .gtk* and .local
- logging out of kde
- setting up a mirror as a distribution source for urpmi (mandriva is offering
non-free e.g. sun-java in its free source these days, but I still need the
PLF sources for codecs, BCI enabled freetype and fontconfig and a few other
things)
- # urpmi urpmi
- # urpmi <bunch of> kernels
- # urpmi --auto-select
and then selecting the ones I would like to upgrade from them

Soon I was running Mandriva 2007.1 Spring (Free). Yay! Its beautiful. The
Ia_ora theme and other Mandriva artwork is gorgeous. I legally own a XP cd,
from which I extensively use Verdana (for text) and Tahoma (for widgets).
They look wonderful as always with plf freetype (w/ hinting). I like to use
large fonts, enough to be readable 4 ft afar but somehow the deja or
bitstream fonts have a weird fuzziness in the curves of 's' and 'o's. I
cleared the settings of a test user account and a default new account looks
quite good (apart from the kbfx-styled mandriva menu).

KDE was upgraded to 3.5.6; I was actually using a few kde-3.5.6 packages from
cooker so there was no huge surprise. I was worried that mandriva would mess
up some of my settings when I log in for the first time as my normal user but
thankfully that did not happen. The system feels faster, konsole definitely
starts faster than before. Overall, I am extremely pleased with 2007.1; I
wish them all the best.
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Releases/Mandriva/2007.1/Tour

Some minor annoyances:
- mandriva kernel (based on 2.6.17) still has the weird cpufreq bug where
scaling_max_freq is same as scaling_min_freq (thus rendering all the
governors useless). It is probably the same problem described in

http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-acpi@vger.kernel.org/msg04484.html
- Suspend to RAM is broken in mm kernel (Mandriva has moved to pm-utils and it
works like a charm w/ the default kernel)
- tmb kernel has some problems of high CPU usage when copying files and broken
resume from s2ram. I still need to test the other tmb versions. I really like
the tmb kernel improvements.