Upgrade systems
Contents
Upgrade system from ROSA/Mandriva 2011 to ROSA 2012 LTS Marathon
Here comes the 2011-->2012 upgrade howto.
Disclaimer
If you wanna get a guaranteed 99% working and reliable operating system, best way to do it is to reinstall a system from scratch. It is important, because ROSA 2012 has a long-time support status.
Upgrade from ROSA/Mandriva - 2011 is also supported because of a small amount of differences in a code base between new and old releases. This HOWTO describes sequence, that is necessary to upgrade the system from previous release, but it does not guarantee its 100% success in overwhelming majority of cases.
Before update
Before planning migration to a new ROSA-2012 release, it’s essential to perform regular system update by installing all the necessary updates. It can be done via GUI applet or from command-line:
urpmi --auto-update
Before upgrading it’s essential to read official release notes, that contain useful information about the changes in a new release and also expected bugs. Attentive and thoughtful reading of release notes can protect you from huge harm.
It’s also necessary to make sure that it’s enough space on a hard disc. During release upgrade all packages will be downloaded to a /var/cache/urpmi. Total amount of packages to download depends on amount of the soft, installed in your system. Usually it is from 4 to 7 Gb.
Upgrade process
So, if previous steps had been completed successfully, it’s time to start upgrading. Upgrading system between releases is recommended to make with help of a command line utilities. To do it, open terminal and switch to root console. You can do it either by running Konsole (or any other terminal emulator you prefer) via KDE menu or by choosing “Open a console as a administrator” in “Configure Your Computer” utility.
First thing you have to do is to remove information about old repositories. It can be performed via a following command:
urpmi.removemedia -a
Then add to urpmi repository of the release to which we want to update (as an example we use updating from Yandex mirror):
For 32-bit systems:
urpmi.addmedia --distrib http://mirror.yandex.ru/rosa/rosa2012lts/repository/i586/
For 64-bit systems:
urpmi.addmedia --distrib http://mirror.yandex.ru/rosa/rosa2012lts/repository/x86_64/
The command above should be a single line!
This command will add all the repositories of new release. Then we need to perform an update to a new release:
urpmi --wget --download-all --auto-update
--wget option makes urpmi to use wget for packages’ downloading. aria2 (used by default), that is not quite correct sometimes. When using --download-all option, urpmi primarily downloads all the packages and starts to install them only after that. This is a strongly recommended option when updating release using urpmi, because it’s necessary to download and update a lot of packages. On default urpmi downloads and installs packages partially, in groups. If there will be problems with internet-connection during update, you can have a partially updated system with this operation scheme that will not work properly. If at all.
If you only need to download updates to install them later ( e.g. to update system at a later time), you need to add --no-install option. When running an upgrade process first thing that urpmi will do is updating itself with all dependencies (perl-packages and new urpmi version) and glibc.
In case of success urpmi will restart itself and suggest further updating of other packages. It will then list packages to be deleted (this is regular when upgrading from one distribution to another). If you accept that and go on with updating, you will see list of packages on your monitor that need to be updated, their total amount and quantity of free disc space, that is necessary for the downloading. Next you have to make sure that you actually have this free space in /var/cache/urpmi. If downloading was difficult because of errors, connected to insufficient internet-connection, you can restart upgrading with a following command line:
urpmi --wget --auto --auto-select
The latter operation (packages downloading and installation) will take a long period, so you only have to cross your fingers and wait for a while.
After a successful installation of packages in boot loader menu you will see an item «ROSA Marathon 2012», which allows to start a new system.
Optional step
It is recommended to synchronize a system with current repositories after updating. To do it open terminal emulator (Konsole on default), and enter the following line:
urpm-reposync
You may need to install urpm-tools package to start the program.
You will then be asked to reinstall some certain packages.
