upgrade

Windows is in the news lately, in a big way. Windows 7 has been released. As I was one of the very disaffected users of Vista, which indeed prompted me to try Linux one more time, I had tried Linux on a number of occasions before, I did make the switch finally, now more than a year ago.

I had been a loyal Window user since the release of Windows 3 (1990) That is a long time ago. In fact having been a software developer since the late sixties I often found myself in the minority of Windows users in large software projects development. I wish I had made the switch sooner.

I have noticed a lot of comments on the burden of upgrading Drupal versions, recently due to Drupal 6.10, just made available. A lot of those comments on the time it takes and the down time conversely experienced by the visitors to the site.

I am using an series of upgrade steps that minimise the down, or 'in maintenance' time' for the user. Here they are. Please use at own risk and benefits. :)

Successful upgrade to Acquia drupal 6.9 completed with this site unavailable (off-line) for less than 30 minutes.

No problems encountered. All seemingly working well.

Thank you, all visitors and members, for your patience during the down time.

Today I switched this site from plain old Drupal to Acquia Drupal. It was an extremely smooth switch over for which I first practised on a test site. The result was that this site wasn't out of action for maintenance for more than two minutes, the time it takes to rename two directories. It took me overall less than and hour and a half, to make all the changes behind the scene.

I have Ubuntu 8.10 (Ibex Intrepid) installed on my PC as, finally, a move from Windows to Linux.

I have had a few problems, no show-stoppers that didn't, or couldn't, get solved. I still have a few issues, some that won't get solved any time soon, I am sure, and some that I will solve as I find them.

I have had a few difficulties with SWF objects in particular, videos especially, that didn't work, or render properly in Ubuntu. I think I have resolved this problem now, by disabling the GNash package and switching to SWFdec instead.

The way to do this was as follows:

I have been a bit slack, with other things on my mind, but I finally upgraded from Drupal 6.6 to 6.8 and all modules to latest.

This was a rather long update. It took me about 2 hours, doing it the right way.

The only issue I had was with the Image module which gave a fatal error elsewhere (accessing the admin page). This is an alpha released module so I have to accept the problem. A quick search showed me a workaround for the problem. I had to enable ImageMagick, which I did not use previously, within Views module and copy the related .inc file to the includes.

Go, go Drupal!