Upgrading from Mandriva

[djennings]

The instructions on upgrading to Mageia 1 from Mandriva could do with a little more detail.
http://www.mageia.org/en/1/migrate/
After installing the mgaonline package the user should stop the mdkapplet either by logging out and back in again or by using the kill command.
The mgaapplet will not automatically start and it does not appear in the menu so it will have to be started with

Code: Select all

mgaapplet &

After a few minutes the invitation to upgrade should appear and the migration can proceed.

Also when I tried an upgrade today the mirrorlist did not work and I had to manually specify a mirror

[pmithrandir]

I was at the same point as you...

Between installation of the rpm and step a, I disn't know what to do.
Thank for your contribution. I'm currently waiting for the upgrade to launch.

I think a direct link in the menu would be much more efficient. Or at least some detailled explanation on the migrate page. It's not something user want to "test" or "try". It's too critical and they can't even stop the process if they finally want to stay on mandriva.
I try to migrate my professionnal computer(all others are already on mageia since 2 month) and that is not a good impression for something critical.

[pmithrandir]

BTW I got this message in place of upgrade information :

Maintenance étendue
Maintenance for this mageia version has ended. No more updates will be delivered for this system.
Afin de conserver votre system sécurisé vous pouvez :
- Voulez vous migrer vers la nouvelle version mageia 1
- Ne pas demander la prochaine fois.

The message is totally wrong...

[yman]

Hi,

Can I just start the post off by congratulating and thanking everyone who contributed to Mageia 1 for a job very well done. This is not a whining post, more to share my experience of what happened for me during upgrade.

I'm a long time Mandriva user and grabbed the ISO last night before upgrading from Mandriva 2010.2. The upgrade process went well enough, it appeared to detect all my hardware correctly, and apply updates to any applications where applicable (e.g. Kde4.5.5 to Kde4.6.3).

Now I don't know whether because I am an edge case user or not (I was previously running Mandriva 2010.2 with MIB backports enabled and so deviated from the official 2010.2 install base) but upon rebooting, problems started and a lot of it had to do with my profile / permissioning being hosed in the transition for some reason and video drivers not being used correctly.

Problems
1: X server wouldn't start - error appeared to be that despite my Mandriva install having the correct drivers for Nvidia Geforce6100 card, and the Mageia update wizard detecting it, after the update Mageia could not load the correct drivers. So after changing the graphics driver used to noveau through drakconf on the console and a reboot, X was able to start.

2: After X started was a string of "error in locking Xauthority" errors; as well as kde4 not able to start with a error 3 which would crash back to KDM. The problem seemed that my entire /home/rui (my username) directory including the .kde and .kde4 subdirectories was not owned by "rui" (my user profile). So after changing the ownership of my home directory I was able to log into Kde4. However KDM still did not list my username at the login, and also I had no access to root user anymore; despite using the same password as one I had setup in Mandriva. There were also other weird permissioning changes in my profile; I could no longer change my own user password, my profile was included in groups that I wasn't in originally and was not included in groups that I was in originally.

3: After X loads there's an error dialog about failure to load consoleKit.

4: After Kde4 starts, DBus service won't load.

As it was getting late in the night, and I didn't feel up to fiddling around trying to correct the remaining niggly problems, in the end I decided to just format my Mandriva partition and do a fresh Mageia install on there. That obviously solved all problems. At the moment I'm in the process of restoring settings and data from backups I have. From what I've seen, the fresh install feels solid and fast. Quite impressed with how slick it looks when it all falls into place.

The TL;DR version:
Problems in upgrade for me were - Driver issues (known good drivers weren't used); profile and permissioning not migrated over properly; consoleKit and DBus issues.

[djennings]

Your problems are probably all resulting from your home directory not having the same UID number as your user.
Mandriva used to always start the users UID numbers from 501, but starting from release 2010.0 (I think) Mandriva defaulted to UID 500. If you select 'Advanced' when adding users during the install then you can select the UID number to match your existing /home directory.

Mageia works exactly the same way as Mandriva. It will allocate UID 500 for the first user unless you override it during the install I suppose ideally the installer ought to check the UID of an existing /home directory while adding users to avoid these sorts of problems. Perhaps you should raise a bug on bigzilla.

It is easy enough to change the ownership. Boot in safe mode and then

Code: Select all

chown username:username -R /home/username
init 5

[yman]

Thanks for the quick reply. I did change ownership which allowed me to more or less have a working system. There were still a few niggly issues though. But I didn't know about the UID change. That's something good to know for the future to check. I suppose I should have checked beforehand as well.

Looking forward to putting the distro through its paces.

[ahmad]

The instructions on upgrading to Mageia 1 from Mandriva could do with a little more detail.
http://www.mageia.org/en/1/migrate/
After installing the mgaonline package the user should stop the mdkapplet either by logging out and back in again or by using the kill command.
The mgaapplet will not automatically start and it does not appear in the menu so it will have to be started with

Code: Select all

mgaapplet &

After a few minutes the invitation to upgrade should appear and the migration can proceed.

Hello. Please file a bug report, maybe this should be mitigated in the mgaonline postinstall scriptlets.

BTW I got this message in place of upgrade information :

Maintenance étendue
Maintenance for this mageia version has ended. No more updates will be delivered for this system.
Afin de conserver votre system sécurisé vous pouvez :
- Voulez vous migrer vers la nouvelle version mageia 1
- Ne pas demander la prochaine fois.

The message is totally wrong...

Please file a bug report.

[djennings]

Ahmad, I have done some experimentation upgrading a virgin installation of Mandriva 2010.2 in a VirtualBox

1/ There is a problem with the spec file of mgaonline-2.77.29-1mga on line 91

Code: Select all

89   %post
90   grep -q pi.mandriva.com/mirror  /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.*/urpm/mirrors.pm && \
91    perl -pi -i.bak -e '$_ = "\t\"http://mirrors.mageia.org/api/mageia.\$product_version.\$arch.list\"\n" if m!https://api.mandriva.com/mirrors/!' \
92    /usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.*/urpm/mirrors.pm || :
93   %{update_desktop_database}
94   %{update_mime_database}

The variable $product_version will be the Mandriva product version 2010.1 or 2010.2 As a result mirrors.pm will look in the wrong directory for the Mageia mirror list. A simple workaround would be to make symlinks on the mageia mirror so for example
http://mirrors.mageia.org/api/mageia.2010.2.i586 points to http://mirrors.mageia.org/api/mageia.1.i586

This bug also prevents upgrading via the command line because the command

Code: Select all

urpmi.addmedia --distrib --mirrorlist

will fail.


2/ Even if the previous fault is fixed the user will still not get the prompt to upgrade because
a/ Immediately after installing mgaonline the mdkapplet is still running, and
b/ The default settings of mgaapplet is to not check for distribution upgrades.
Logging out and logging in again will cause the mgaapplet to start running (I was mistaken in my first post on this thread)
Running the application mgaapplet-config in a terminal enables the user to set the configuration to check for distribution upgrades, but it could be some time before the message appears inviting an upgrade. A quicker method is to run the application mgaapplet-upgrade-helper in a terminal which will immediately get the Mageia sources and start the upgrade. (Assuming the bug mentioned above is fixed)


Bug report number 1568 has been raised
https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1568

[ahmad]

(You're right, and thanks for the bug report).

[jkerr82508]

(You're right, and thanks for the bug report).

I don't agree:

https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1568#c3

IIRC the only "inline" method of upgrading from mdv that was tested was using the applet in the manner described in my comment in the bug report. It's the only method we were asked to test. Was any other method tested (other than removing the mdv sources and adding Mageia sources using "urpmi.addmedia --distrib --<mirror_url>")?

Jim

[ahmad]

(You're right, and thanks for the bug report).

I don't agree:

https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1568#c3

IIRC the only "inline" method of upgrading from mdv that was tested was using the applet in the manner described in my comment in the bug report. It's the only method we were asked to test. Was any other method tested?

Jim

Check the release notes, the part about using urpmi is wrong, the bit about 'urpmi.addmedia --distro --mirrorlist' doesn't work, yet it's in the notes...

[jkerr82508]

O.K. but, I think, that's the only point about which he's right.

Jim

Edit: Scratch that. Insomnia keeps me awake - but not alert. Most of what he says is true - but the applet does work if used as "intended".

[pmithrandir]

On my side, I had a old mandriva with several package installed and I finally download the new live CD to install it from USB key. It was too unstable after the update.

[ahmad]

O.K. but, I think, that's the only point about which he's right. :)

Jim

Edit: Scratch that. Insomnia keeps me awake - but not alert. Most of what he says is true - but the applet does work if used as "intended".

Anssi has cracked that issue in a couple of bug reports (which you probably already saw, since you seem to keep an eye on the bugs ML :)). (e.g. /var/cache/urpmi/mirrors.cache not getting invalidated when mgaonline is installed).