upgrading to Mageia 5 from 4.1

[lloyd]

I'm pretty sure I know what the answer is going to be, but I guess you never know unless you ask....

Using the Mageia 5 Final (when it's released), is it possible to upgrade to Mageia 5 x86-64 from Mageia 4.1 x32?
Or would I just wipe 4.1 and re-install from scratch?

Thanks and have a wonderful day!

Looking forward to Mageia 5!

Lloyd

[martinw]

No, an upgrade will just update what you have already installed. You'll need to reinstall. If you have your home directory on the same partition as the main system, make sure you first make a backup copy onto a different partition (or safer still, a different drive).

If you have plenty of space on your drive, my advice is always to create at least three partitions, one for the current version of Mageia (mount point "/"), one for the next version, and one for your home directory (mount point "/home"). Then when a new version of Mageia comes out, you can install it into the inactive partition and check everything works, whilst still having the old version to fall back on if it doesn't.

[jiml8]

When I made the move from Mandriva 10.1 32 bit to Mageia 2 64 bit, I began by using rsync to copy the entire system (exclusive of /home) to a directory on another drive. I then did a clean install of Mageia 2 64 bit, and made those configuration changes necessary to get that clean install to point to my existing /home directories.

Then, I installed the various packages I needed (there were many) and I recovered my configuration by copying /etc from the old 32 bit installation to /etc on the new 64 bit installation. This worked almost totally without incident. I was careful to save my new 64 bit /etc elsewhere before doing this, just in case. But IIRC, I did not need it.

I did have to do a few things to deal with config changes (especially in KDE) in the time between Mandriva 10.1 and Mageia 2, but almost everything worked almost immediately. I also had trouble getting maria and apache to run, using the configs from the old /etc, but other than those things (and an assortment of other minor config issues) I had the whole thing running very quickly.

I would expect a move from Mageia 4 32 bit to Mageia 5 64 bit to be even easier.

[tarakbumba]

If you really want to convert from 32bit to 64 bit, being Mageia 5 upgrade or not; i think jiml8's way is the most applicable one. Only binaries and libraries would change. So, making a backup of /etc, /usr/share and /home (if they are not in a separate partitions) and doing a clean install then would suffice. Notice that you may need to modify files which point to /usr/lib, /lib (symlink now i think) so that they point to /usr/lib64 and /lib. But there is no guarantee that you lost your configurations or data.