Distribution Update

Summary:

• 1 Do I Need Updates?
• 2 Updating Your Mandriva Systems
• 3 Update Or Fresh Installation?
• 4 How To Update By Installing Anew
• 5 Related Resources:

Do I Need Updates?

The market for open source software is very active. If you review sites such as Freshmeat or SourceForge.net you will find numerous daily announcements. This does not include open source software that does not participate with these sites.

Many open source applications are included with Mandriva are updates for security and bug fixes. Applications that you select that are not included with Mandriva will need to be separately updated, such as Compiere or SugarCRM . One of the differences between the Mandriva distributions for enterprises and individuals is the supported life. The supported life of Mandriva software products can be found here. Mandriva products for individuals have a supported life for updates of 12-18 months. Mandriva products for the enterprise have a five year supported life.

Mandriva is very proud of its update system, and the updates that it provides for the the operating system and applications. Mandriva conducts many tests before releasing a new version. We try very hard to find all bugs. With that as the goal, we identify most bugs for the Mandriva software for individuals, but it is extremely difficult to verify thousands of software applications on a myriad of different hardware configurations.

Mandriva consumer and enterprise software have many tools to assist you with the updates in the Mandriva Control Center. If you have any questions concerning security updates, please make sure that your product is supported by Mandriva on Mandriva's product support lifetime page. If you are using a product that is no longer supported for updates, you will need to find resources to make sure that these packages are appropriately patched for vulnerabilities.

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Updating Your Mandriva Systems

Updates are offered in several convenient ways. As a member of the Club, you may download software, and and can obtain updates from Mandriva, or through the public mirrors that Mandriva has constructed with its partners.

• Purchases - Mandriva offers MandrivaOnline, its subscription service to validate that your Mandriva systems are up to date. As a member of the Mandriva Club, you have access to proprietary software such as the No Machine Client called NX Client, RealPlayer, Opera and proprietary drivers from ATI and Nvidia for your consumer software.
• Mandriva Enterprise products - Five Year Supported Life - For Mandriva users where stability over a long life is important, Mandriva offers the Mandriva Corporate Desktop . The Mandriva Corporate Desktop is supported for updates to December 2009, the longest of Mandriva's desktop solutions.
• Mandriva Free - A three CD set of Mandriva can be downloaded for free .
• Mandriva One - A single live/installable CD that can be downloaded for free .

An ISO is a single image, that when burned is converted to a standard CD or DVD that can be used for installation. If you download a DVD or CD ISO image, you need to verify that the download is complete, and that you did receive all of the download that you did receive. To insure that your download is correct, there is a file that ends with md5. You will need to download the file 'MD5SUM' (or 'md5sum'(s)) in the same directory. If you are using a Linux computer, and are at the command line, you can launch the following command:

md5sum .iso

In the directory where you downloaded the ISO.

If you are using a system with Microsoft Windows, you will need to download the file md5sum.exe , and copy it to a directory. Next open a command window in method line order and type:

md5sum -b .iso

The validation of the MD5SUM will take several minutes depending on your hardware configuration. Take the MD5SUM result and compare it to the number contained in the file ending with .md5. If the numbers are identical, your download was accurate. If the nubmers are different, then your download file is corrupt and may introduce serious errors.

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1.3 Ways To Perform An Installation Or Update

Currently, Mandriva offers these installation methods or of update:

• Boot and install from the CD. The hardware bios of your computer will need to be configured start from the CD before the hard disk.
• Booter à partir de DOS et installer à partir du CD. Exécutez 'autorun.exe' à partir du répertoire 'dosutils' du CD. Notez que ceci ne fonctionne pas à partir d'une fenêtre DOS dans Windows.
• Booter à partir d'une disquette et installer à partir du CD. Dans le cas où vous ne pouvez pas booter à partir du CD, vous pouvez créer une disquette de démarrage dans Windows et l'utiliser pour booter. Insérez simplement le CD de Mandriva sous Windows et suivez les écrans. L'image dont vous avez besoin s'appelle 'cdrom.img', elle se trouve dans le répertoire 'images'.
  Pour créer l'image sous Linux, lancez

  dd if={path/image} of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k

• Installation à partir 'une partition du disque dur. Copiez ou téléchargez la distribution complète ou les images ISO dans un répertoire de Windows (FAT16/32, pas NTFS) ou une partition Linux (ext2). Démarrez l'installation en utilisant une disquette de boot comportant l'image 'hd.img'.
• Installation par le réseau (NFS, FTP, HTTP, USB). Utilisez une disquette de boot avec l'image 'network.img'. Sur un portable muni d'une carte réseau PCMCIA/PC-Card, utilisez 'pcmcia.img'. Pour une installation via des connections USB, utilisez 'usbnet.img' (nouvelle dans la in 8.1). Les installations via PLIP or SLIP ne sont actuellement pas supportées.

• other.img, qui est une image contenant des drivers moins utilisés pour des matériels SCSI ou réseau.
• blank.img, qui vous permet de démarrer l'installation avec un noyau de votre crû.
• memtest86.bin, a stand-alone floppy based RAM integrity checker image. Utilisez-là si vous obtenez des erreurs d'installation bizarres, afin de vérifier si la RAM du système est OK.
• README, un fichier texte qui contient des instructions supplémentaires.

Update Or Fresh Installation?

Well that depends a little bit.

If your data is all on seperated partitions from the Mandriva installation partition, I would do the following:

1. backup all data you do not want to loose (I never had a data loss before during about 8 update installs, but always better to be on the safe side)

3. Check for all the applications that you regularly use and that might not be present in the standard Mandriva install. Write them down.

4. Do a fresh install of 2006 and overwrite only root (/). Make sure that the other partitions refer again to the correct mount point e.g. /home). Make sure as well to set up the same users again with the same user name but certainly as well with the same UID (set it manually, overwriting what Mandriva proposes). That will ensure that the users wil have access again to all their files and stuff.

5. After the installation finished, setup your urpmi sources (using http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/)

6. Install all software that did not get installed by the Mandriva defaults (better to do that only now, with PLF sources set up, then during installation).

7. Test everything and where necessary reconfigure. Depending on the amount of changes between the versions, more or less configurations will be kept.

Installing this way makes sure that your installation is completely clean. You need to take care though to set the correct mount points and UIDs, or you will have problems (which can proably be solved, but which you would want to avoid anyhow).

In installing a new version of Mandriva, you can install as a new system, or you can upgrade your existing Mandriva system. If you have separate partitions for your operating system and user data, you should find it easy to install the operating system as a new installation. If you have only one partition, you may wish to use the update functionality provided by Mandriva. Before installing, please make an backup of all data.

1. Backup all data you do not want to lose.

3. After the installation concludes, you will need to set an update source. Go to the Mandriva Control Center, and click updates to select an update mirror.

4. Test your critical applications.

Installing this way is easier, but might give a less stable result. Problems may arise particularly if you use software that is not supported and tested with Mandriva. If you find that your software is not compatible with a new Mandriva release, you may wish to consider the Mandriva Corporate Desktop which is supported for five years.

To replace your Mandriva system, you have two possibilities: an update 'reelle' that installera the new versions one top of the old software or a new installation after has backup of customizations.

Although an update 'real' be quicker to realize and does not ask almost any work, the second method presents several major advantages:

• 'L'effet spring-cleaning'. D'après ma propre expérience, the more you get to know GNU/Linux, the more picky will you get when it comes to installing software. Qui réellement keeps track de tous les paquetages installés qui n'oublie pas de temps en temps d'effacer un paquetage dont il n'a plus besoin? A chaque installation vous deviendrez plus sage, vous installerez moins de logiciels, mais des logiciels plus adaptés à votre profil.
  En outre il peut être très difficile de diagnostiquer les erreurs: une mise à jour qui a échoué? des dépendances erronées? une erreur programme?
• Problèmes avec RPM. Bien que RPM soit bon pour mettre à jour quelques paquetages de temps en temps, a system-wide upgrade est une tâche beaucoup plus lourde. Cela fonctionne étonnament bien pour la plupart des gens mais occasionne beaucoup de problèmes pour quelques uns. J'ai une fois appartenu à cette dernière catégorie (en utilisant une distribution différente que j'ai balancée après cette expérience) et depuis lors je réalise une installation au lieu d'un upgrade.
• 'L'effet backup'. Pour une nouvelle installation il vous faudra d'abord sauvegarder vos customizations. Cette sauvegarde constitue une assurance de premier ordre pour votre système, puisque vous pouvez tuck it away to quelque endroit sûr et l'utiliser à nouveau si un problème survient. Otherwise vous pourriez rencontrer un problème that makes you wish you had a backup - et une part du problème c'est que vous ne pouvez plus faire de sauvegardes...

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How To Update By Installing Anew

While being the better alternative - in my opinion -, doing an update by installing anew means a lot of work:

• Make backups. This involves all the changed configuration files. A backup of all configuration files is not advisable.
  To find out which configuration files have changed since installation, run

find /etc -mtime -60 -type f -print > changed.txt

as 'root'. This will give you a list of files ('changed.txt') in '/etc' which have been changed (or installed) during the last 60 days. You might need to adjust the

-mtime

mkdir ~/backup

find /etc -mtime -60 -type f -exec cp {} ~/backup ;

as 'root'. Repeat this for your own, for root's and for any other user's home directory.
You might want to copy the backup directory to an external medium (it should fit on a floppy). If '/home' doesn't have a partition on its own, you have to do this1.1
Consider whether you want to backup downloaded program packages or source directories, too.

• Install the new system. If you haven't copied the backup directory to an external medium or if your home directory contains much personal stuff, do the installation in 'custom' or 'expert' mode. You need to do this to prevent the installation program from formatting your '/home' partition1.1
• Apply the backups to your new system. Do this with consideration1.1 The configuration files of the new system may contain important new content, which you should not blindly overwrite. You should use the 'diff' command to see if there are changes besides your customizations, like

diff -y ––width 80 ––suppress-common-lines {your backup file} {appropriate new config file}

If there are, apply your customizations to the new config file rather than overwriting it with the old one.
This is the reason why you shouldn't just back up all the configuration files on your old system: comparing these would keep you busy for quite a while… ;-).

• Install your own programs again (optional). This might be a good chance however to check if there are newer versions of them out there...

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Related Resources:

'README' in CD's 'images' directory

Revision / Modified: Sep. 20, 2001 / Oct. 09, 2001
Author: Tom Berger

Legal: This page is covered by the GNU Free Documentation License . Standard disclaimers of warranty apply. Copyright LSTB and Mandrakesoft.