I ran a test today, upgrading from Mageia 1 to Cauldron, as part of the qa testing for Mageia 2.
On my 7 year old i586 system, a Mageia 1 install containing Gnome, KDE, and LXDM, the upgrade install of 2,187 packages took about 2 hours. There were no package or file conflicts. There was one postinstall scriptlet that failed, which has been reported and already fixed. There was one postuninstall scriplet that failed, which will likely result in an update for Mageia 1. Neither of these two bugs caused any problems in the resulting installation. This is the cleanest upgrade distribution version upgrade I've ever seen. The only other problem I saw, were that, after installing 2100 packages in one transaction, the distribution dialog appeared to hang, for about 20 minutes. A little checking during the apparent hang, showed that is was processing 260,516 file triggers. After the delay, the dialog saying to reboot, just closed when the reboot button was selected. After manually rebooting, the system came up properly, with everything working, that I checked. The upgrade testing has reached the point where the testing needs a wider variety of hardware and package selection, so more testers would be appreciated. If you have the time, and available disk space, please consider trying out the upgrade procedure, and reporting any problems found. Note that, at this point in time, upgrade testing will result in an installation that will get it's updates from the Cauldron repositories, which by their nature, can be unstable at times. Don't use this for a production system! Make sure you have a full backup, and tested restore procedures, just in case. The easiest way to test the upgrading from Mageia 1 to Cauldron, is to open a terminal and run the commands $ sudo urpmi --auto-update $ killall mgaapplet $ mgaapplet --testing & Then select the More information button on the dialog that opens up, and follow the prompts. During my test, 1.1GB of data was downloaded to /var, so make sure you have the space available. Also, make sure /boot has at least 24MB of free space. The update can also be done using a boot.iso image as described at https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Boot.iso_install The boot.iso can be downloaded from http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/mageia/distrib/cauldron/i586/install/images/ or http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/mageia/distrib/cauldron/x86_64/install/images/ or the corresponding directory of your favourite mirror. Both of the above methods require a reasonably fast and stable internet connection. A third option, would be using the beta 2 dvd iso image, which can be downloaded from http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/mageia/iso/cauldron/ Note that a lot of bugs have been fixed since the beta 2 iso images were created. Be sure to install updates as part of the installation, or use "urpmi --auto-update" after the first reboot. Do not use rpmdrake from the beta 2 iso. There are some known bugs that are being worked on, but have workarounds available. If you have /usr on a lvm logical volume, the initrd from the upgrade will fail to boot. The workaround for this is to add the kernel option rd.break=pre-pivot during the first boot. To edit the kernel options, press f3 on the grub selection menu, then select defaults, the type a space followed by the option, then press enter. Once the system starts to boot, a bash shell will open up where you can enter the commands ... # lvm vgchange -a y # exit A second shell will open after the pivot to the new root. Just type in "exit" again, and press enter. Once the system has booted, open a terminal and run the command $ sudo dracut -f That will create a new initrd, that will properly mount the /usr on a logical volume, for future boots. This bug is being tracked in https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4562 Another problem that requires a workaround for now, is that for some (most?) ide controllers, the order of the loading of kernel modules will result in ide hard drives being assigned /dev/hd? instead of /dev/sd?. Also, ide cd/dvd drives will be assigned /dev/hd? instead of /dev/sr?, making them inaccessible. If your system has ide drives, before upgrading, run the command $ lspcidrake|grep IDE The first part of the output is the kernel module that should be used for the ide controller on your system. It will be something like pata_via, pata_amd, or ata_piix. Make note of which module is used. After the upgrade, modify /boot/grub/menu.lst, to add the option rdloaddriver=pata_via (replacing pata_via with the module used for your ide controller. This bug is being tracked in https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4997 The more people we have testing now, the better chance we have of having a great release, when Mageia 2 is released. Remember, Mageia 2 is a community release. The more people who contribute, the better the release will get. You can help too. The qa team could really use more people. When Mageia 2 does get released, our workload will double, as many updates will require testing in both Mageia 1 and 2. Even if you can only put in a few hours per week, every bit helps. All you have to do to join, is subscribe to two mailing lists, then pick updates you have the hardware and software needed to test, and start testing, reporting your results on bugzilla. See https://wiki.mageia.org/en/QA_Team for more details. Regards, Dave Hodgins
