[Mageia-discuss] Upgrade from Mageia1 using urpmi: success story ; )

[Markus Ueberall]

Hi,

Last night I successfully upgraded my older Thinkpad X60T from mga1
using urpmi, following the steps in the wiki: http://bit.ly/JplfVO.
It went rather well, but some manual corrections were necessary:

First of all, if you have less than 3GB of free space left on the HDD,
better don't try to upgrade this way--instead, get additional space.
2GB are needed under /var/cache/urpmi/ alone, but using a spare 4GB
usbstick and "mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdXX; mount /dev/sdXX /var/cache/urpmi"
nowadays solves this easily.

Two or three times, a .rpm could not be replaced which meant that also a
large number of the 2300+ packages to be upgraded would not install due
to missing dependencies. It pays to log everything from the beginning
using "script mga2-upgrade.log" before starting the urpmi command and
inspecting this logfile using less in another terminal window. After you
manually upgraded the problematic rpm in question (each time, just
replacing a single rpm or a small number of rpms listed in the failed
transaction in order to be able to retry from a different configuration
afterwards solved the problem for me), just rerun "urpmi --replacefiles
--auto-update --auto".

Since the new kernel (kernel-vserver in my case) is installed fairly
early, I explicitely removed and reinstalled the two files
(kernel(-vserver) and kernel(vserver)-latest) before restarting to be
safe--this might not be needed.

The only unexpected problem after a reboot was that the now
systemd-based initialisation aborted because it was not possible to
mount the windows partitions (this is a dual-boot setting with a
hibernated Windows instance); after commenting out these partitions in
/etc/fstab, a reboot succeeded.

Since I always upgraded the laptop instead of doing a clean reinstall, I
still have some >100 mdv packages (2009.0 and later) on it--maybe these
should be inspected/moved one day, but all in all, I'm rather happy with
the way the upgrade went. :)

Ad astra, Markus