Before migrating to exiting new Mandriva 2011 you need to update your currently running system with help of urpmi:
[root@localhost ~]# urpmi --auto-update
Also it is possible to use standart Mandriva Update applet for this purpose:
Before do something you MUST carefully read Mandriva 2011 Release Notes[1], that contains a bunch of useful information about features of new Mandriva. A careful Release Notes reading can save you from many possible problems :).
Next, make sure you have enough free space on your hard drive. All packages during upgrade process will be downloaded to the directory /var/cache/urpmi. The total amount of downloaded packages depends on the amount of installed software on your system, and urpmi will show this before downloading packages. Normally, this value is 4 to 7 GB. If your /var filesystem have not enough disk space don’t care about it. In urpmi, you can specify an alternative path for downloading packages (see below).
How to Upgrading Mandriva 2010 to Mandriva 2011
The first thing to do – remove the old repositories from your currently running system. You can do it with the command below:
[root@localhost ~]# urpmi.removemedia -a
Then add to the urpmi repository information for the release to which we want to update (in an example below there is a system updated from Russian Yandex mirror – you can choose your own favorite and nearest to you). So, the command for 32-bit systems:
[root@localhost ~]# urpmi.addmedia --distrib --mirrorlist http://mirror.yandex.ru/mandriva/official/2011/i586
And for 64-bit systems:
[root@localhost ~]# urpmi.addmedia --distrib --mirrorlist http://mirror.yandex.ru/mandriva/official/2011/x86_64/
This command will add all the needed repositories. Next command magically upgrade your system to a new release:
[root@localhost ~]# urpmi --wget --download-all --auto-update
Option –wget tell urpmi to use wget to download packages. By default, urpmi uses aria2 that is not always works correctly.
When you use –download-all option urpmi will download all the packages first and then begins to install all of them. It is strongly recommended option for migration to a new release with urpmi. It is used to provide reliable update, you need to download and update a lot of packages. If you do not use this option and during update process you face Internet connection problems, you will get a very bad situation when only part of system will be updated, that will result in problems with correct system working.
If you wish only to download updates and not install them (for example, to upgrade system later), you need to add the option –no-install.
When you run the update process, the first thing that will make urpmi, is updating itself with all the dependencies and the package management stack (perl-related packages and a new version of rpm). In Mandriva 2011 version system has migrated to the rpm5 package management utility. After installation of new package management tools, special scripts will start that automagically convert your rpm database to the new format.
If all went well – urpmi restarts itself and prompts you to upgrade the rest of the packages. It will show you a series of questions for packages upgrades. For example, it would be the name of the package with the latest kernel version, variants of Java-machine (OpenJDK or Sun Java) etc. urpmi also displays information about system packages that will be removed (it’s okay during upgrade from one distro release to another). If you agree with urpmi and continue to upgrade, you will see a list of packages that need updating, the total number and the amount of disk space that would be necessary for them to download. You should once again make sure that you have this amount of free disk space in /var/cache/urpmi. If you don’t have enough disk space in the /var filesystem, you can use any other filesystem to store the downloaded packages. This can be done using the following command:
[root@localhost ~]# urpmi --wget --auto-update --download-all /path/to/download/folder
The latter operation (downloading packages and their subsequent installation) will take a long time, so only cross your fingers, pray your God for good luck and wait, wait, wait …
Upon completion this very long process you must restart the system, and if all of this goes well – you will see K Display Manager screen with a new design. Select your account, type your password and log into your new updated system. Congratulations! You have upgraded to Mandriva 2011!
