Upgrading Mageia 6 directly to the latest version

[BlueDragon]

Hi all,

According to the Mageia 8 Release Notes, it's not possible to upgrade directly from Mageia 6 to Mageia 8.

So my question is simple, how can / should I upgrade in a simple way. I didn't work with Linux for 5 years and unfortunately, I have almost forgotten everything about it...

Thanks for your help.

[sturmvogel]

Upgrade either from 6 -> 7 -> 8 -> 9 or simply do a fresh installation of 9 as it is way faster...

[benmc]

do take a backup of any important (to you) files.
If you have a separate /home partition, clone the partition to an off-system storage device.
If you dont have a separate /home partition, copy the /home directory to an off-system storage device.
Then if something goes pear shaped with the install (as you say, its been 5 years) you still have your personal files safe'n'sound.

If there is nothing important (as you say, its been 5 years), as sturmvogel suggests, just install over your existing system, either using the Live or Classical Install media.

[BlueDragon]

Thanks for the hints!

"Fresh" or "over", that's the question now. I guess as with windows (but not so dramatically) a fresh installation is the way to go, though I will loose all my KDE tweakings, which took me quite a while to set up... I hate to have to reinstall all from scratch (because it means days of work, to have it again as I was used to) but mostly it's simply the best way to go, to have a smoothly running system.

[doktor5000]

According to the Mageia 8 Release Notes, it's not possible to upgrade directly from Mageia 6 to Mageia 8.

Well, it only mentions that this is not supported, not that it's not possible.

The other question would probably be, why are you still running Mageia 6 which is EOL since 2019 ?

[BlueDragon]

Well, it only mentions that this is not supported, not that it's not possible.

Indeed, that's an important difference. Thanks for pointing that out. BTW the system offered me the upgrade but I didn't accept until now, fearing to make it absolutely useless.

The other question would probably be, why are you still running Mageia 6 which is EOL since 2019 ?

Because I was living almost 4 years in Ukraine and I didn't have the needed financial condition to take this (heavy) computer with me. Another question could be, why no one ever thought about such possible occurences. Even the browser can't be updated at all and thus many ressources are simply not available anymore, even to prepare such an upgrade. Life is life Dok!

[morgano]

It is convenient to keep /home during fresh system install, but you may want to exclude the settings file as the may contain incompatible settings for both the desktop, and various application programs. So I temporarily renamed ~/.config before first login, then cautiously restored select content.
Similar for some other locations.

[xboxboy]

I'm late here, but I'd back up as much data as possible (including the kde tweaks you did) and then update the current version fully, reboot, then upgrade version by version.
It should work, but it's a pretty unique case.