[Mageia-dev] ANN: Upgrading from Mageia 2 via urpmi

Colin Guthrie mageia at colin.guthr.ie
Sun Nov 18 17:37:43 CET 2012


Hi,

As many of you know, upgrading from Mageia 2 is somewhat tricky due to
the usr move.

With Alpha3 comes the ability for the installer to upgrade the
filesystem layout, but many of you (myself included) prefer upgrading
via urpmi rather than the installer.

While this is possible with some manual commands, it's not as trivial a
task as it should be - until now!!

So I've just pushed the package mageia-prepare-upgrade to mga2
core/updates_testing.

This package, when installed will add a new menu option to your
bootloader. Simply install this package, reboot, select the "Mageia 3
Upgrade Preparation" entry boot, wait while your FS is converted and
then perform a urpmi upgrade as you would normally.

I've not specifically tested the upgrade part, only the installation and
creation of the initrd and bootloader entries in grub. I've also not
done this on an mga2 machine yet but will do soon enough.

I just wanted to get this package "out there" for anyone wanting to
update their mga2 machines to mga3 a3 but not wanting to use the installer.

At present there are a few limitations:

1. It requires kernel 3.3.8-2.mga2 to be installed (any flavour should
work). A specific kernel version is not really 100% necessary but it
does mean I can add hard requires to the package. This is only desirable
to prevent the situation where users install this upgrade package but do
not run it and later remove the kernel used to generate the initrd for
the bootloader menu item, thus breaking it. Any smarter ideas on how to
manage this welcome.

2. If you have /usr in a separate partition and have it mounted ro in
your fstab, you will have to manually change the fstab to rw for the
upgrade boot.


Happy testing. Let me know if it kills any kittens. Please keep a backup
etc. etc.

Col

-- 

Colin Guthrie
colin(at)mageia.org
http://colin.guthr.ie/

Day Job:
  Tribalogic Limited http://www.tribalogic.net/
Open Source:
  Mageia Contributor http://www.mageia.org/
  PulseAudio Hacker http://www.pulseaudio.org/
  Trac Hacker http://trac.edgewall.org/


More information about the Mageia-dev mailing list