General Advice for Installing 2006

[banjo]

Greetings,

 

I am seriously considering upgrading by beat up ol Mandy 9.1 to a later version. My apps are seriously out of date, and upgrading the apps requires upgrading the whole system at this point. My Mandy Linux has been a rock! Nearly three years of virus-free, adware-free, crash-free computing. :D

 

But I have three years of history on this Linux computer which I cannot afford to lose. Starting over on things like bookmarks and mail folders etc. would be a major pain. So here is my plan:

 

1) Get a new disk and partition it the way the current one is partitioned.

2) Copy my entire /home partition onto the new disk

3) Get a copy of Mandy 2006 and install it on the new disk using my old /home directories

4) If all goes well, make my old disk into a backup external.

 

Will this procedure allow me to install the new OS and preserve my current files and settings?

 

Is the Mandy installer smart enough to make use of my current user information?

 

Is this the right order to do this in, or should I install first and then copy over the files?

 

Is Mandy 2006 a stable release that I can rely on as I have relied on Mandy 9.1 all these years?

 

Any advice in how to do this task would be more than welcome.

 

Thanks in advance

Banjo

(_)=='=~

[arctic]

It should work. The only things that might be a bit problematic are some config settings for e.g. KDE or Gnome You might need to rename those to /.filename.old if your desktop looks and acts weird. Your Mozilla, Kmail, Evolution accounts and other settings should be safe.

 

You can install Mdv 2006 first and then copy over the files you need from your old drive (The better way imho. And, if possible, burn your /home files on some CDs or DVDs, just in case you run into some hardware failure some day) or do it the other way round. Both ways are acceptable.

 

Mdv2006 has been very stable for me. I trust it for my scientific work on my main laptop (as that one refuses to tick with Fedora). The only crashes I experienced so far was Firefox quitting once in 100 times, but that is acceptable. What you should stay away from is beagle! It is very alpha still and it borked up a /home/user account once on one of my desktop machines. 35 Documents were irreparably lost... :sad:

 

Apart from beagle, I really can't complain. B)

[polemicz]

With KDE stay away from kat! Also go over the issues with some nividia cards with the xorg that comes with 2006 (after updates all is well).

[banjo]

Thanks for the info. I guess what I am most confused about is how to get the old users back without doing a bunch of manual work. I understand that if I just create them again I might not get back the original UIDs and GIDs. I don't remember the exact order that I created them in. I suppose that I could write them down and then boot my Knoppix and fix up the numbers after they are created.

 

I currently back up my important data on an external disk and occasionally burn it into CD's as well. I will certainly do a backup before attempting any upgrade.

 

Banjo

(_)=='=~

[arctic]

the UID and GID problem can be solved later by launching a simple command as root for every user once.

 

chown -R username:username /home/username

[AussieJohn]

Hello banjo. It has been quite a while since we have heard from you. Welcome back.

Since you have done and still do backups to your docs, the only other things to do are to export your bookmarks to a safe partition or on to a floppy (2 floppys just in case). Copy your Mail Folder and export your email contact addresses to an alternate partition or burn all this important stuff to a CD.

Mandriva is so slick and quick nowdays that I often reformat /home as well when I do a reinstall or fresh upgrade because it takes next to no time to reconfigure appearence and style. Mandy has come a very very long way since 9.1.

I am sure you will be delightfully surprised just how much.

 

Cheers. John.

[banjo]

AussieJohn,

 

Thanks for the welcome back. I was gone because of a very strange problem I was having with the web site. Whenever I tried to go to any of the forums my DSL modem/router would crash and reboot itself. The web site took down my entire home network. It did not matter if I went to the site from my Linux computer or any of the Windows boxen we have. After I tried to visit a forum I would have to reboot the entire home network.

 

A few days ago, on a whim, I decided to try again, and the problem was gone. I don't know what happened, but I am back.

 

Arctic, thanks for the tip on reassigning ownership. I had not thought of that trick.

 

Thanks to all for the information on upgrading. My Mandy 9.1 is such a rock in the midst of all these Windows boxen that I hate to risk it even to do an upgrade. But the time has come, the Walrus said.

 

As I do this I will log any issues I run into just in case anyone is interested in the stumbling blocks I run into.

 

Linux rocks!

 

Banjo

(_)=='=~

[bigjohn]

However you manage to sort things so that you don't loose anything this time banjo, I found that it was so much less hassle in the "loosing data" department to make sure I have a seperate /home partition.

 

That way, I can basically mess around to my hearts content with different versions of one distro or indeed different distros. I just install to the / and absolutely don't touch the /home. I make sure that theres the requisite entry for /home in the fstab and as long as I install the same packages/apps then when I log into the /home all the icons etc "just work". Of course any specific customisations like backgrounds and iconsets etc have to be re-installed, but all that nice, precious data stuff it untouched.

 

The way I saved myself before I did the above, was to "tar" my whole /home directory and burn it to a disc. Then it can be re-installed/copied at a later time with nothing missing. It might save you the expense of additional hard drives etc.

 

regards

 

John

[banjo]

John,

 

Thanks for the pointers. I do have my /home on a separate partition. But my apps are so stale at this point that I don't even know if the new ones will be able to make sense of the old config files. This will be the first time that I have ever attempted to upgrade my Linux, so I will be extra cautious. Maybe next time I will just go for it.

 

I am trapped by my own success with Linux. I now have my family members relying on this OS (because it is so solid), and I dasn't lose their stuff. When you deal with fnWindoze, you just get used to the idea that at any time on any day all of your stuff is going to just go up in smoke.

 

But with Linux, you start to believe that computing can be done in a stable environment, so people start saving things that they really want to keep...... and assume that it will be there tomorrow. It makes the sys-admin job a bit tougher LOL.

 

And always remember that old Unix aphorism......... "As ye fool around, so shall ye learn."

 

Banjo

(_)=='=~

[banjo]

Well, I did it.

 

I have finally upgraded my Mandrake 9.1 system to the new Mandriva 2006 after three happy years of computing on the old system. I did not have a problem with my old Mandy 9.1 except that the applications were out of date, and the newer apps require resources that are not on my 9.1.

 

Now that I have gone through the update exercise, I thought that I would post the details of what I did in case anyone else is planning to do the same thing and wants to see how I did it.

 

This posting is long because I wanted to include the details as well as an overview of it. If you are not interested in reading a long, boring discussion of upgrade details, hit your back button now!

 

Because I have three years of files belonging to four users stored on the old system, and I cannot afford to lose those, and I have never done a Linux upgrade before, I decided to do it on a new disk. I partitioned and formatted a new disk the same way as the old one and then I copied pertinent information from the old one to the new one. After doing that, I simply installed Mandy 2006 on the new disk with no possible danger to the information on the old one. The old disk remains mounted in the computer but disconnected. Once I am convinced that we are good to go on the new Mandy, that old disk will be reformatted into an external backup. It is a little bit expensive to do it this way, but I will sleep better at night knowing that our files are safe.

 

Before I go any further with the details, here is my review of the new Mandriva 2006 installation.

 

Yay

 

That said, here is how I did it, step by step.

 

I bought a new hard disk. I got a Seagate 160 Gig drive even though the orginal disk is only 120 Gig. They just keep getting bigger. But then, so do the files that we must store. 87 bucks OEM from Newegg. 'Nuff said.

 

I bought the Mandriva 2006 Power Pack from the Mandriva Store. It cost me about $90. Sounds expensive for a free OS, but I do not mind paying for an excellent product that works as well as Mandriva. Call me a chump. I ordered it online, and in about three days it showed up at my door. Good service.

 

***************************************

Install The New Disk

***************************************

 

I installed new drive as the master drive on IDE0 in order to partition it. I disconnected the original disk completely to make absolutely sure that I would not partition the old disk and wipe out all of the information (I can be fairly stupid at times). I really really do not want to lose those files.

 

I booted the computer to Setup and confirmed that the BIOS had seen the new disk. Then, I set the boot priority to boot from the ATAPI drive so that I could boot Knoppix.

 

I booted to Knoppix to do this job. It is a wonderful tool for system maintenance when the maintenance involves messing with the disk drives. If you don't have a copy, download it or order a CD. It will save your butt.

 

Knoppix showed /dev/hda unmounted and unpartitioned and unformatted. So the first step was to partition the new disk.

 

***************************************

Partition The New Disk

***************************************

 

The old partition setup was

 

part1 / 6 Gig

part2 extended

part5 swap 0.5 Gig

part6 /home 88.5 Gig

part7 /usr 25 Gig

 

I partioned the new disk in a similar fashion, but with slightly larger partition sizes.

 

part1 / 6 Gig

part2 extended

part5 swap 0.5 Gig

part6 /home 125 Gig

part7 /usr 28.5 Gig

 

I used cfdisk to partition /dev/hda. Cfdisk is a curses based version of fdisk. It works great.

 

I ran cfdisk against the new, virgin disk and got:

 

> cfdisk /dev/hda
No partition table or unknown signature on partition table
Do you wish to start with a zero table [y/N] ?

 

I answered "yes" and I was presented with an empty partition table and a menu at the bottom of the screen. Here is an example of one of the menus.

 

	  [Bootable]  [ Delete ]  [  Help  ]  [Maximize]  [ Print  ]  [  Quit  ]  [  Type  ]
  [ Units  ]  [ Write  ]

 

Use the arrow keys to highlight the desired function and type the Enter key to perform the function. You will be prompted for the appropriate types and sizes. Make sure to toggle the Boot flag ON for the primary partition, hda1.

 

I created one [Primary] partition and three [Logical] partitions. Cfdisk named the partitions for me. I did not have to create the extended partion, hda2, which contains the three logical partitions; cfdisk did that for me.

 

I had to create the partitions in the proper order to get them numbered with the appropriate numbers. I wanted the numbers to match the original numbers to minimize any differences with the existing /etc/fstab. I was not sure if the installer would read that file or not. I believe that it did not, but I don't know that for sure. I created the partions in the following order:

 

/

swap

/home

/usr

 

 

Here is the result of my efforts as displayed by cfdisk

											cfdisk 2.12q

									 Disk Drive: /dev/hda
							  Size: 160041885696 bytes, 160.0 GB
					Heads: 255   Sectors per Track: 63   Cylinders: 19457

 Name		   Flags		 Part Type	 FS Type			  [Label]		Size (MB)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 hda1		   Boot		   Primary	  Linux ext3							  5996.23
 hda5						  Logical	  Linux swap 			 				 501.75
 hda6						  Logical	  Linux ext3		   [/home]		   24999.59
 hda7						  Logical	  Linux ext3		   [usr]			 28541.73

 

I then selected [Write] from the menu and answered "yes" when asked if I really wanted to write the partition table. After the partition table was written to the disk the new partitions showed up in /dev.

 

/dev>ls hda*
hda  hda1  hda2  hda5  hda6  hda7

 

Notice hda2, which is the extended partition created to hold the logical partitions, 5, 6, and 7.

 

 

 

***************************************

Make File Systems On The New Disk

***************************************

 

The next step was to make file systems on the

new disk partitions.

 

Use mke2fs on each partition

 

Options

-j creates the ext3 journal

-c checks for bad blocks

-L <name> labels the file system

/dev/hda* is the target partition

 

> mke2fs -j -c -L /  /dev/hda1
> mke2fs -j -L /home /dev/hda6
> mke2fs -j -L /usr  /dev/hda7

 

If you use the -c flag, this will take a long long time. That flag causes mke2fs to check the disk for bad blocks. I did it on the smallest partition, /, and it took 34 minutes to complete the task. I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and figured out that /usr would take about 167 minutes and /home would take 708 minutes! That is over 14 and 1/2 hours! That would be way too long for me to wait, so I bailed out on the -c for the other partitions. Without using the -c flag making the file systems took 2 minutes 45 seconds for /usr and 11 minutes for /home. I can live with that.

 

***************************************

Copy Files From Old Disk To New Disk

***************************************

 

Once the new file systems were in place, I copied all of the files from the original disk onto the new one. I only copied the contents of / and /home. I did not copy /usr because that would all get replaced by the installation anyway. I did not want any of that detritus lying around on the new disk.

 

I did not know if the installer would use any of the files on / or not, but it was small so I copied it anyway. I copied /home over because all of our files are on /home.

 

To do the copy, I shut down the computer and re-attached the old drive as the master on the IDE so that it would show up as /dev/hda, and I demoted the new drive to the slave drive so that it would show up as /dev/hdb.

 

I did the file copy using Knoppix so that the old disk will be mounted read-only. This should minimize any accidents causing files being written to the old disk by mistake as I am copying them over (I can be really stupid at times).

 

I then made the mountpoints for new and old root directories:

 

> mkdir /mnt/newroot
> mkdir /mnt/oldroot

 

These mount points exist only in the RAM disk of Knoppix, so they must be recreated each time you boot Knoppix.

 

I mounted the root partiions

 

> mount -w /dev/hdb1 	/mnt/newroot
> mount -r /dev/hda1	/mnt/oldroot

 

Then, I copied the contents of the old root directory over to the new root directory.

 

> cp -pax /mnt/oldroot/ /mnt/newroot

 

Options:

p means preserve the ownership, timestamps etc

a means archive, same as dpR

d means do not dereference links

R means recursive copy

x means stay on this one file system

 

Once the root directories have been created and copied, the mount points for /home exists on the new disk. So I mounted and copied the other partition.

 

> mount -r /dev/hda6 /mnt/oldroot/home

 

Mount the new file system and copy.

> mount - w /dev/hdb6 /mnt/newroot/home
> cp -pax /mnt/oldroot/home /mnt/newroot

 

I left the "home" name off the destination path because if I put it there, cp would create a new directory by that name in the existing directory, and I would end up with /mnt/newroot/home/home. I found this out the hard way once.

 

The above commands took quite a while to complete. In fact the copy of root to root took about four minutes, and it was only about 286 Meg of files. The copy of /home to /home took three hours and 44 minutes! That seems really slow to me, but it did get done. I would like to find out if there is a faster way to do this copy. I did not use dd because the two partitions are different sizes and I did not know what dd would do to the new file system.

 

 

 

************** IMPORTANT **********************

Unmount all of the disks to flush out the files.

************************************************

 

> umount /mnt/oldroot
> umount /mnt/newroot/home
> umount /mnt/newroot

 

Shutdown Knoppix and turn off the power.

 

***************************************

Swap The Disks

***************************************

 

At this point, the new disk was ready for the installation. It had a copy of / and a copy of /home. So I shutdown and opened the computer to disconnect the old drive once again. I reconnected only the new drive as the master.

 

Unplug the IDE cable and power plugs from both disks.

 

Jumper the new disk to be IDE master.

 

Plug the IDE cable and power plug into only the new disk.

 

 

I then rebooted using the Mandriva installation CD for the install. I chose a clean install instead of the upgrade option.

 

I will not go through the details of the installation since it looked very much like aRTee's excellent writeup, which you can see here http://www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr/installmdv2006.html

 

I did tell it to show me all of the packages so that I could select the ones that I wanted. One thing I wanted to do was disable installation of kat. I do not want a search engine eating up my CPU to maintain itself. I also added in some packages that were not included by default.

 

One thing that had me worried at the start, was how I would get my old users back with the proper user and group ID numbers. Well, I needn't have worried because, when I got to the part where you create the users, it stepped through each one of them and recreated them just fine. I had to supply the Real Name and Password for each one, but other than that it just found them. Each time I clicked on "Accept User" it presented the next user until it was done, and then it presented me with a blank form to create any new users that I wanted to. The user and group ID's were preserved.

 

One word of caution: I had a bogus directory in /home (called "apps") where I had intended to store applications, and the installer created a "user" for it. I ended up with an inadvertent user called "apps". Evidently, it is looking at directories in /home and assumes that each one is a user. This screwed up the ID numbers on the very last legitimate user, so I had to correct that after the installation. I fixed it using the suggestion from arctic, basically using chown like this:

 

chown -R username:username /home/username

 

I will get rid of the bogus user later. Just make certain that there are only legitimate user directories in /home and you should be OK.

 

I have two printers connected to the system, one Lexmark E312L and an Epson-C84. I turned them both on prior to doing the installation and they were both recognized and set up flawlessly.

 

At the end of the installation, it asks you if you want to get the updates. I held my breath and clicked "Yes" thinking that I had just got my self into a loooong download. In fact, it took only about 20 seconds. I have no idea what it did.

 

The whole installation took about one and one half hours (not counting making the new disk), mostly because I looked at every package and made a decision. Most of that time was spent staring at the screen. It would go a lot faster if you just accepted the defaults.

 

Finally it was done, and I booted the computer. It came up with a "First Time" wizard that was supposed to create an access account out on Mandriva. Once again, I held my breath and clicked on "Yes". It hung up completely. It just sat there........ no busy cursor... no nothin'.

 

Finally, just as I was about to give up on it and push the power button it timed out with an error "Mandriva Services Not Reachable". So I clicked on "Skip It" and moved forward. So much for Mandriva Services.

 

When I finally got it booted, a bunch of the applications were missing. I expected this because I had downloaded them and installed them myself, so they were not on the distro. One of the missing was Firefox, which I had mistakenly installed down in /usr/share on the old system. The new installation put it (properly enough) in /usr/bin and called it "mozilla-firefox". All of my desktop links pointed to /usr/share/firefox/firefox (don't ask), so I had to update those and then it worked OK.

 

The applications that I had downloaded and installed myself were not there. These included Audacity and Inkscape, etc. I poked around on the mirror sites and found them on contrib. I went ahead and set up my urpmi to point at the main and contrib sites. I had not been able to figure all of that out when I installed the Mandy 9.1, but thanks to aRTee's excellent writeup of that feature I did it this time. Look here for the explanation of urpmi:

 

http://www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr/review2006.html#lrepo

 

I followed the instructions on that site and soon after that I found and installed my other applications. I even went out and found OpenOffice2.0 and installed it. The distro DVD only had OOo1.1.5 on it. I was somewhat spooked by the size of the OpenOffice2.0 downloads (about 150 Meg), but in the end it only took about 20 minutes to do the whole installation. Urpmi worked flawlessly. Thank goodness for broadband.

 

One problem did arise with the graphics. When I shut down, the screen went bonkers with nothing but noise. I found the answer to that problem here on the board as well. I just had to add a line to my xorg.conf file to give it some information about my Nvidia graphics card. I found the answer in the Hardware forum, here:

 

https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtopic=31273

 

So far I am happy with my new Mandriva. The apps have been nicely upgraded and it does everything that I need. The graphics are a bit slow for some apps, like the new Firefox, but that could be the generic Nvidia driver that was installed. I will have to address that issue later.

 

That is about it. I am still fine-tuning the applications and getting used to the changes in them, but all-in-all it only took a few days to get it all back. I think that I can recommend an upgrade if you have an older system. The applications are better, and lots of bugs that I had been living with for a while have now been fixed. So, here is my review of Mandriva 2006 again.

 

Yay

 

***************************************

Questions:

***************************************

I wonder why it takes so long to do the surface check using the -c option on mke2fs. Anybody know?

 

I also wonder why the copies took so long. It seems really slow to wait for three and one half hours to copy 18 Gig across a dedicated IDE. What did I do wrong? Is there a faster way?

 

I hope this writeup is not too long. I wanted to include all of the details so that it can provide some answers for those who have not yet been through this. I learned a lot about what is on my disk and how to maintain it by doing the upgrade. The beauty of Linux is that all of this is possible, unlike some other well-known but inferior operating systems.

 

Happy computing to all.

 

Linux rocks!

 

Banjo

(_)=='=~