Upgrade Mageia 3 -> 4 with limited system space

[jimg]

I'm gettting ready to upgrade my Mageia 3 system to 4. I'd like use the online approach, but I read that it will download about 3.5 GB and my system partition has about 2 GB free. Does the upgrade tool store all the 3.5 GB at once? Should it work without modification? Or should I do something different (such as designate a folder in a different partition, or just burn a disc)?

By the way, I checked out designating a different location through the tool, but it said I needed to provide a location that root could access, and wouldn't let me select any folder in the user partition (where the rest of the space is). I thought root could do anything....

Thanks in advance. I upgraded another machine and it all went flawlessly. Thanks for a wonderful system!

-Jim

[Ken-Bergen]

I'm not sure about the upgrade but it should act like an update where several rpm's are downloaded as a group, installed and then the downloaded rpm's are deleted before moving on to the next group.

Whether 2GB free on / is enough depends on what you have installed.

[jiml8]

Personally, I would bet against 2GB being enough, and I certainly would not want to be caught with an upgrade partially completed and failing due to a full partition.

I would suggest you identify a space-consumptive portion of your system (such as one of the major subdirectories under /usr), copy the whole thing to a different partition, delete the copy within /usr, and replace with a symlink to the new location. That will give you the room you need to do the upgrade. Likely candidates for such a move are /usr/share/doc, /usr/src, /usr/include. You can move these without hosing the system. Moving the three of them will likely save you about 1 GB of space.

Other candidates include /var/www and /var/lib.

Also take a look in /var/log and in /var/log/journal and delete any .gz files you find. This could free a LOT of space, just depending on whether or not you have done your routine housekeeping.

[doktor5000]

Also, it may be a good idea to go through a list of the biggest packages and remove those that you don't need.

Code: Select all

rpm -qa --qf "%{SIZE}\t - \t%{N}\n" | sort -rn | head -35

I'd say 2GB is more then enough, but better be safe than sorry.

[jimg]

Thanks everyone. The list of packages sorted by size is a very handy code snippet that I'm going to save for future use. Also, filelight was very helpful. Turns out the lilypond-doc package is almost 1 GB by itself, and the documentation available online anyway. Between uninstalling that and deleting some old log files, I now have more than 3.5 free.

I agree with everyone that it would make sense to download and store everything needed for an upgrade. That's how I would design a tool if it were up to me. However, does anyone know how the tool is actually intended to work? How was it tested? Will it tell me if I have insufficient room, or would it fail in some nasty way? The documentation is sparse on this point. If someone out there happens to know positively how the tool goes about this, commenting on this post would be a cheap way to put this information in a searchable place, while the documentation becomes more complete. (I know documentation, like everything else, is a volunteer effort for which I'm grateful. I intend this post as a contribution, not a criticism.)

Thanks again! The Mageia forum has been consistently helpful and I've found that my issues converge quickly to a solution, which is a testament to a well-designed system and a knowledgeable, helpful community.

[doktor5000]

AFAICT the update applet effectively does the same as urpmi would do, and simply take a look how many packages would be installed/updated,
and urpmi will show an overview on huch much will be downloaded and how much additional space is needed. It will take that information,
and show it to you, with the hint that at least that much space should be available. It will probably also check if that much space is available in the target directory.

Simply try it and you will know

Also, as you asked how the upgrade procedures have been tested, take a look at https://wiki.mageia.org/en/QA_process_f ... g_upgrades

[jimg]

I just upgraded and I wanted to report what I saw.

No, I did not try upgrading with 2GB free--not on my main system! But downloading all packages at once is presented as an option, and is not the default. I did not select this option, and accordingly the tool went through many iterations of downloading, verifying signatures, installing, and deleting. First it did a batch of about 200 packages, then it did about 5 packages at a time. So it's quite possible that it could succeed with limited storage space.

Incidentally, this took a number of hours, because this machine is a netbook, and verifying a signature is computationally intensive. Certainly downloading an ISO image and checking the integrity of the whole thing would be much faster than verifying every package. However, while slow, the process was completely smooth. I went to a concert and came back.

One other thing I'll report in case it benefits others: I had a large number of orphaned packages (109). Normally with this number, I suspect that "urpme --auto-orphans" has made a mistake. However, I checked four or five of the alleged orphans and found that they were obsolete packages, even though they are Mageia 4 packages. For instance, the current version of Lilypond requires guile1.8; a guile library (not a guile1.8 library) was listed as orphaned. So I suppose guile got upgraded, but Lilypond has moved to guile1.8. So in fact guile was a true orphan. Anyway, I removed the auto-orphans, and nothing seems amiss.

-Jim

[doktor5000]

For the orphans and for smooth upgrade, this is what I did for upgrade preparation:

Go through the orphans list:

Code: Select all

urpmq --auto-orphans

If OK, remove all of them

Code: Select all

urpme --auto-orphans

Then check which packages you have installed which are not in the currently configured repositories (usually 3rd party packages, selfmade packages or those from development version, like for get-skype)

Code: Select all

urpmq --not-available

I had quite a lot of packages in the list from building packages for Mageia users, testing new software myself and quite a lot of -debuginfo packages from debugging.
Removed nearly all of them.

Then saved a list of installed packages

Code: Select all

rpm -qa --qf="%{N} \n" | sort > $WHERETOBACKUP/packages_installed.txt

Then after the upgrade, checked again for orphans, and also had quite a lot of them, mostly really old packages. Removed all of them.