(libata cautions deleted per Cecil's comment)
I have read posts of
users breaking their systems by getting 0.21 and
building it on top of a working KM, but I am not an expert in
this area, so I offer only general advice.
Cecil posts that he will be releasing a new R5 version
(R5G??) soon, perhaps this weekend or next would be my guess.
(If your system is working as it is, then do you really need
to upgrade to 0.21? If you are like me, you want to upgrade
more than you need to upgrade
)
-------------
I have explained a bit more than needed for someone who is
building their own distros for their FE's, but others may find
this helpful.
I find that backing up the whole boot partition (usually
/dev/hda1 or /dev/sda1) onto a DVD or spare hard drive
gives you a lot, all the files that you have modified that you
forgot about till after you formatted over them, and a complete
backup of the software, but not the recordings. If you back
up onto an ext2 or ext3 file system you can even do a restore
to get back to a working system. If you use something like
"dd bs=1M if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/XXX" (assuming /dev/hda1
is your boot partition and where XXX is a partition on the spare
hard drive that is the same size as the boot partition) to back
up to a spare hard drive then you can restore it just as easilly
(boot on a Knoppix CD and use dd in the reverse direction;
beware that later versions of Knoppix may use libata too and
that your /dev/hda may become /dev/sda).
My first best advice would be to spend your time making an
exact list of what you have done to get where you are on
your current system. You have succeeded when you can build
an R5F27 on a spare hard drive that works as well as your
current system. This list will be very helpful in the future, like
when R6 comes out.
Other than that, first of all copy your KM hard drive onto a
spare, take all the KM hard drives out and put the spare where
the main hard drive was. Experiment with the spare.
Check the knoppmyth wiki at http://www.knoppmythwiki.org
or just go straight to the article http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=CompileMythTVFromSVN
Good luck!
Cliff