is it possible to upgrade online from 2008.0 to 2008.1 ?

Alessandro Serra

Dear all
I am a bit new to Mandriva, since I used other distros in the past.
I am having problems burning the 2008.1 iso, so I thought that maybe I could upgrade my mandriva 2008.0 to 2008.1 online.
However it does not seems the case.
Can anybody please explain to me how to do it if it is possible for free?
Thank you very much

awilliamson · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2008 11:32 am Post subject:

Yes, it is, though success is not entirely guaranteed Smile

I'd back up first.

Fundamentally the process is quite easy. You remove all your existing repositories, then you set up 2008 Spring repositories: you can use Easy URPMI to do this ( http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/ ) . Get /release and /updates repositories for /main , /contrib and /non-free . Then you do:

urpmi --auto-update -v

make the sensible answers to all questions you're asked, and wait. A long time. Then you reboot, and cross your fingers. Smile

Captain Bodge · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2008 7:36 pm Post subject:

Hi Adam,

Just out of interest, does the Mandriva team have any ideas as to why a network upgrade can be a slightly hit-and-miss affair? I appreciate entirely that's it's an immensely complex issue and when I upgraded 2007.1 to 2008 this way and it worked perfectly I was pleasantly surprised. My upgrade from 2008.0 to 2008.1 didn't go so smoothly though... I accept this and was prepared for it but I wondered.. if the team has any ideas as to particular things that makes this process less likely to work, then we could make a more informed choice as to how to upgrade. For me, a network upgrade is much more convenient, mainly because the free DVD doesn't inlcude third-party drivers and it always screws up my x config for that reason, but the DVD upgrade is much more reliable. So it's always a difficult choice... Smile

Reebus · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2008 8:24 pm Post subject:

Last I tried, one stoopid curl error in the midst of a bazillion files being downloaded crapped the whole thing out. 5 hours into it. Never again.
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Donald Stewart · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2008 8:37 pm Post subject:

Does the same apply when upgrading from 2008.1rc2 to 2008.1 or does a system update suffice?
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Reebus · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2008 8:39 pm Post subject:

Donald Stewart · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2008 8:50 pm Post subject:

I just deleted all of the 2008.1 cooker repos and added the 2008.1 ones from easy urpmi.
I just have horrible memories of doing this with ubuntu, ended up with something that I recognised as debian.
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medo3891 · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2008 8:59 pm Post subject:

Donald Stewart · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2008 9:23 pm Post subject:

Reebus · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2008 9:30 pm Post subject:

medo3891 · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2008 9:34 pm Post subject:

too>> three Laughing

(a stupid pun but plz let it slide)
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Donald Stewart · Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2008 10:13 pm Post subject:

the avalanche has past.

Its updating now, hoping for the best.
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awilliamson · Posted: Sun Apr 13, 2008 11:48 am Post subject:

For RC2 to final you should be fine doing exactly as you described.

Captain Bodge: the main factors are how big your installation is (the more packages, the more chance for something to go wrong), how customized it is (the more customizations, the more chance some of them will be lost or cause problems), and whether you've installed any third party packages (always a bad idea). We generally test that both the installer's 'upgrade' feature and an urpmi upgrade work from a fairly clean install of the previous release, but beyond that it gets really difficult to make sure everything's okay.

We'd love to be able to pay 100 people to do nothing but test the update feature on varying installations of different previous releases, and if we could afford that we could make upgrades *really reliable*, but we can't :\. It's not really an engineering problem - there's no really clever solution we could come up with that would make sure upgrades always worked. There's such an incredibly variety of things that could possibly go wrong that it's basically impossible to cover them on a theoretical level. The only practical approach is test-and-fix.

If you're wondering how the big, stupid bug in the installer upgrade feature in 2008 Spring got through, BTW, the wrong version of one installer component was inadvertently included in the final images, no-one noticed, and the upgrade function wasn't re-tested in the final round of tests :\
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Captain Bodge · Posted: Sun Apr 13, 2008 11:57 am Post subject:

Adam, thanks for that. I do software testing for a living, I have some idea of what you're up against! I was trying to calculate for myself the number of permutations of packages, but it was more than my calculator could handle.... Smile

I actually think urpmi does a pretty good job considering what it's trying to do. You mention cusomtisations, that's something I hadn't even thought of and it almost certainly explains why my 2008.0 to 2008.1 upgrade didn't go so well. It's completely understandable. I think the lesson there for everybody is to back up or make notes of all customisations you've done, and perhaps even revert them before trying an upgrade. Thanks for the help.

Donald Stewart · Posted: Sun Apr 13, 2008 5:59 pm Post subject:

medo3891 · Posted: Sun Apr 13, 2008 6:11 pm Post subject:

Donald Stewart · Posted: Mon Apr 14, 2008 11:39 am Post subject:

Ok, well glad to hear that everything is fixed.
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Pedro Carvalho · Posted: Mon Apr 14, 2008 3:53 pm Post subject:

Yes, it is possible to upgrade Mandriva online. I have done it for several years now, even before Mandriva was Mandriva Smile

. Yesterday, I upgraded my Mandriva 2008.0 installs to Mandriva 2008.1 Spring. There where some problems but no show stoppers.

I do a weekly full backup and incremental backups every day so I timed the upgrade with the full backup. If you don't do backups, before upgrading your system it's a very good time to do it. I strongly advise not to skip a backup.

Next I had to configure the repositories for the 2008.1 version. The safe, better and easy method to accomplish this is to remove the old repositories and add the new ones.

I used an alternative method. It's faster but dangerous. Edited the /etc/urpmi/urpmi.cfg and replaced all "2008.0" strings in the URLs with "2008.1" strings. Then run "urpmi.update -a" and check the changes for errors.

Now the repositories are ready and it's time to do the upgrade. Run "urpmi --auto-update -noclean". Depending on what is installed in your system, it will ask a few question when there are various packages that can satisfy the safe "dependence". I may also ask do uninstall some conflicting packages.

I used the "-noclean" to prevent the urpmi from deleting the rpm that it downloads. I will use them to upgrade other systems after I have tested everything. It will save time and bandwidth.

Now reboot and cross your fingers.

I had several problems while upgrading.

The first problem was that I did not have enough space in /var partition so the upgrade process stopped in the middle. I just had to increase the /var space and rerun the command "urpmi --auto-update -noclean". The "-noclean" switch prevented urpmi from cleaning the cache so all the previously downloaded RPMs where still there saving time and bandwidth. This problem was obviously my mistake.

The second problem was that the package tetex was damaged in the repository. I had to download that package from another repository and place it in the cache. Problem solved. I have encountered this problem before when making package updates. The people that make me mirrors should make a final check on them to avoid these problem.

The third problem was a devel package (libfontconfig-devel if my memory is correct) that was causing problems. I uninstalled it and several others that depended on it and the problem was solved. After the install I reinstalled the packages I had removed without problems. Don't exactly know what was the cause, maybe a dependency resolution bug in urpmi or a maybe package with some incorrectly defined dependency.

This process updated ~1300 packages in my system and I am now testing the system to see if there are any problems. If every thing works correctly I update all other Mandriva systems.

My final thoughts on the upgrade process. Upgrading Mandriva 2008.0 to 2008.1 using online repositories was easy (for me at least) even if not problem free.

Mandriva did a great job. Fully upgrading a live system, given the variety of possible configurations, is very impressive.

Thanks to all Mandriva, GNU, Linux and FOSS people for their great work!

Moonshine · Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2008 7:41 am Post subject:

Curiosity got this cat so to speak, so I've pulled out my MDV 2008.0 hard drive and gone for an upgrade on it using a combination of two methods mentioned here.

1) Back up the current urpmi.cfg
2) Change the repos mentioned in urpmi.cfg to 2008.1
3) Run urpmi.update -a to verify repos
4) urpmi --auto-update -v

(after backing up the /home partition, of course)

So far, all's well with it. It's actually removing more than it's adding, which is a good thing.

We'll see after it's done and I've rebooted how it turns out.

I'm not even an hr and a half in btw, and it's already half done.

If all goes well with this, then next off will be to install SoS repos, and snag their KDE (which, btw, has been written for 2008.1 -- see here). Very Happy

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RichardCrane · Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2008 12:20 pm Post subject:

So back online yet ? Dying to know and if it was successful can you please post a summary of your setup up hware and installed sware.

AW - as the only Mandrivia person who seems to regularly read and answer things here can you possibly put this thread into the tricks and tips ie how to update without a new CD/DVD?

Moonshine · Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2008 12:25 pm Post subject:

Yeppers, I'm back up. Very Happy

Had to take some time out to explore and get things set up differently than I had 'em before (y'know, new system, new stuff to check out and run for a bit).

Word of advice: use the method I posted, but take one final step when it's done:

Run urpmi --auto-select.

urpmi --auto-select -v just updates the basic "stuff" to get you going, but it doesn't update all the packages you installed to 2008 (i.e. a lot of the PLF stuff didn't update).

Then, reboot (not before you run it, but after).

This is pretty damned cool. There's only one crash that I had, and it was a minor one. When I went into Appearances to check out the new icon sets it crashed when I customized the SphereCrystal theme for Gnome, with the Dropline Neu! icons. Was just playing around, and it was no big deal. The icons took anyway, and I was having problems with that particular thing in 2008.0 anyway.

That's the only single thing I've had happen so far, and don't expect much (if any) more.

Can't say I'm awfully fond of OO 2.4.0, but then I'm not an OO person anyway. I much prefer Abiword.

Major edit: Important for you to know, I used ftp://ftp.free.fr for the repos.

Kinda proud of myself on this. 2008.0 was my first ftp install, and now this is my first online upgrade. Both went well. Proud

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Moonshine · Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2008 12:43 pm Post subject:

Oh yeah, you wanted to know my system?
Intel P4 Pro chip - 2.4 GHz, 1 Gb DDR, Audigy 2, NVidia 7300 GT, Mobile docking bay so I can switch hard drives (in order to run different distros), lessee,,, eth 10/100, 10 Mb p/sec download, 512 Kb p/sec upload connection,,,

80 Gb primary for Mandriva, 160 Gb secondary for whatever, and a 320 Gb Seagate external usb hdd. The rest are smaller hard drives that I use in the mobile docking bay.

And, I see on the new kernel, that I have to do like I did with the one on 2008.0, and install the upstream driver, and blow dkms and the nvidia kernel to the wind.

what else you want to know?
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Pedro Carvalho · Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2008 2:10 pm Post subject:

Moonshine · Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2008 2:32 pm Post subject:

Yep. But there's still some it can't upgrade, because the dependencies aren't installed yet or something, who knows. I ran urpmi.update -a when I was done with the upgrade itself, and then ran urpmi --auto-select, and it found 498 more packages that needed upgrading.

Another thing too: it did not upgrade the kernel, contrary to what it said it was doing. I had to do that separately, from the MCC.
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Pedro Carvalho · Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2008 9:54 pm Post subject:

After I solved the problems I indicated before, urpmi upgraded ~1300 packages in one run. It also installed a new kernel. In the first boot after the upgrade all the drivers (e.g. nvidia, gspca, fuse) where installed by dkms with no problems.

Maybe, an error occurred while installing/upgrading a package that caused the urpmi to stop there. That happened to me once on a package upgrade (a driver upgrade if memory serves). Any way, rerunning "urpmi --auto-select" usually continues the upgrade from where it stopped. Stopping on a package install/update error may be a urpmi feature to allow the operator to take notice and action if necessary.