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#1 2012-05-08 16:37:20

b9anders
Member
Registered: 2007-11-07
Posts: 691

upgrading a 20 month old arch system

Just fired up my old laptop that has been sitting dormant for ages and hit pacman -Qi kernel26 to see when I last upgraded, 20 months ago, then hit pacman -Syu.

So far so good. It upgraded pacman first without incident, and once I moved the pacman.conf.pacnew to its proper place and ran  pacman -Syu, it was just a question of hitting 'yes' a score of times on replacement packages and conflicting packages, before being faced with a choice to download some 600MB of new packages worth, requiring about 420MB additional space to be up to date.

Currently still downloading. Will post a few screenshots afterwards and let you know how it all went. It's interesting to see though, how much my xfce system has progressed since then. Think I'll start using it again as a test machine and backup.

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#2 2012-05-08 18:39:35

b9anders
Member
Registered: 2007-11-07
Posts: 691

Re: upgrading a 20 month old arch system

Well, it seems all did no go as smooth as hoped. Just did the first reboot and X won't load. GDM crashes with the following output:

WARNING **: failed to acquire org.gnome.DisplayManager
WARNING **: could not acquire name; bailing out
WARNING **: GdmDisplay lasted 1,698960 seconds
WARNING **: GdmDisplayFactory: maximum number of x display failures reachesL check X server log for details

any takers?

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#3 2012-05-08 19:18:37

tomegun
Developer
From: France
Registered: 2010-05-28
Posts: 661

Re: upgrading a 20 month old arch system

b9anders: don't know the answer to your particular issue, but if you are going to upgrade from a very old system, I suggest reading throug the news entries to then as there will (regrettably) be some issues to sort out...

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#4 2012-05-08 19:21:25

ANOKNUSA
Member
Registered: 2010-10-22
Posts: 2,141

Re: upgrading a 20 month old arch system

I think the OP knows that.  This looks to me like more of a fun little experiment, like poking a sleeping bear with a sharp stick. tongue

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#5 2012-05-08 21:49:23

b9anders
Member
Registered: 2007-11-07
Posts: 691

Re: upgrading a 20 month old arch system

anokusa has the right of it. I basically just want to see if I can get it somewhat up and running after such a long time without upgrades (and also knowing there have been some fairly radical changes to how arch works since then).

If not, it's a wipe and start over.

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#6 2012-05-09 00:09:57

Jristz
Member
From: America/Santiago
Registered: 2011-06-11
Posts: 1,022

Re: upgrading a 20 month old arch system

radical changes...kernel26 to linux
begin of the usr mergin
initcpio aditions and changes
moduleconf (or whatever the name) remplaced by kmod
new base packages and new base-devels
big change in rc.conf
deprecated of hal
begin of udev2

and this is the modt criticals updates..

is possible bur requiere a LOT of user interference and patience


Well, I suppose that this is somekind of signature, no?

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#7 2012-05-09 00:24:05

Trilby
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Registered: 2011-11-29
Posts: 29,444
Website

Re: upgrading a 20 month old arch system

Well your arch setup seems fine, just that godam thing ... I mean that gdm thing is trouble.

If it were me, I'd cut gdm out of "the circuit" and boot to rl 3 and get gnome up and running via startx/xinit.  If/when that's working there's only that one problem left with gdm.  Solution: get rid of it ;o)

Or get rid of it, and reinstall just that, not the whole system.


"UNIX is simple and coherent..." - Dennis Ritchie, "GNU's Not UNIX" -  Richard Stallman

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#8 2012-05-21 10:39:27

Artefact2
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From: France
Registered: 2008-04-22
Posts: 5
Website

Re: upgrading a 20 month old arch system

Trilby wrote:

Well your arch setup seems fine, just that godam thing ... I mean that gdm thing is trouble.

If it were me, I'd cut gdm out of "the circuit" and boot to rl 3 and get gnome up and running via startx/xinit.  If/when that's working there's only that one problem left with gdm.  Solution: get rid of it ;o)

Or get rid of it, and reinstall just that, not the whole system.

Although it's more of a workaround for OP's issue, I have to agree. I use xinit/startx too, it's just much simpler and works just as well.

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#9 2012-05-21 10:58:29

Awebb
Member
Registered: 2010-05-06
Posts: 6,275

Re: upgrading a 20 month old arch system

Now I feel like installing Arch in a VM and letting it lay dormant for two years.

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#10 2012-05-21 20:30:54

ethail
Member
From: Spain
Registered: 2011-02-10
Posts: 225

Re: upgrading a 20 month old arch system

Awebb wrote:

Now I feel like installing Arch in a VM and letting it lay dormant for two years.


Grabbing an Arch core install from this days and installing it after that time has passed sounds more disk-efficient to me


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#11 2012-05-21 20:36:08

Awebb
Member
Registered: 2010-05-06
Posts: 6,275

Re: upgrading a 20 month old arch system

Indeed, but half the moon would have to fall from the sky and smash Thailand to make me worry about free disk capacity :-)

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#12 2012-05-21 20:43:50

Inxsible
Forum Fellow
From: Chicago
Registered: 2008-06-09
Posts: 9,183

Re: upgrading a 20 month old arch system

This thread reminds me that I do have an old Arch linux laptop that I haven't updated in 8 months (at least). Should be fun to try updating it now.

Although I use i3 on it -  it cannot run xfce let alone gnome (256MB RAM PIII). I think the only issue should be the changes in the i3config file.


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There's no such thing as a stupid question, but there sure are a lot of inquisitive idiots !

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#13 2012-05-21 20:49:25

litemotiv
Forum Fellow
Registered: 2008-08-01
Posts: 5,026

Re: upgrading a 20 month old arch system

Inxsible wrote:

This thread reminds me that I do have an old Arch linux laptop that I haven't updated in 8 months (at least). Should be fun to try updating it now.

Although I use i3 on it -  it cannot run xfce let alone gnome (256MB RAM PIII). I think the only issue should be the changes in the i3config file.

I did my office server this afternoon which wasn't updated in about a year, no (serious) problems. :-)


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#14 2012-06-08 07:44:36

rwd
Member
Registered: 2009-02-08
Posts: 664

Re: upgrading a 20 month old arch system

Same here. Updated server after 9 months, no big issues. But I read the old news beforehand, taking away some of the 'fun' wink.

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#15 2012-06-21 06:16:05

hobarrera
Member
From: The Netherlands
Registered: 2011-04-12
Posts: 355
Website

Re: upgrading a 20 month old arch system

tomegun wrote:

b9anders: don't know the answer to your particular issue, but if you are going to upgrade from a very old system, I suggest reading throug the news entries to then as there will (regrettably) be some issues to sort out...

Running "pacman -S base base-devel --needed" would have been a good idea as well.

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#16 2012-06-21 06:46:39

iv597
Member
From: United States
Registered: 2011-09-18
Posts: 96
Website

Re: upgrading a 20 month old arch system

Awebb wrote:

Now I feel like installing Arch in a VM and letting it lay dormant for two years.

I suppose another experiment could be to install one of the really, really early Arch ISOs in a VM and try to update it. I'm not even sure if it'd be possible, honestly. Too many drastically huge updates, probably.


Currently running Arch on a Samsung Chromebook Pro (dual booted with ChromeOS), and various VPSes and Docker containers.

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#17 2012-06-21 07:00:09

ngoonee
Forum Fellow
From: Between Thailand and Singapore
Registered: 2009-03-17
Posts: 7,354

Re: upgrading a 20 month old arch system

iv597 wrote:
Awebb wrote:

Now I feel like installing Arch in a VM and letting it lay dormant for two years.

I suppose another experiment could be to install one of the really, really early Arch ISOs in a VM and try to update it. I'm not even sure if it'd be possible, honestly. Too many drastically huge updates, probably.

"Exercise left to the reader"


Allan-Volunteer on the (topic being discussed) mailn lists. You never get the people who matters attention on the forums.
jasonwryan-Installing Arch is a measure of your literacy. Maintaining Arch is a measure of your diligence. Contributing to Arch is a measure of your competence.
Griemak-Bleeding edge, not bleeding flat. Edge denotes falls will occur from time to time. Bring your own parachute.

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#18 2012-06-24 03:16:30

DanGray
Member
Registered: 2004-08-15
Posts: 23

Re: upgrading a 20 month old arch system

If you're seeing:

WARNING **: failed to acquire org.gnome.DisplayManager
WARNING **: could not acquire name; bailing out
WARNING **: GdmDisplay lasted 1,698960 seconds
WARNING **: GdmDisplayFactory: maximum number of x display failures reachesL check X server log for details

After an update, do a

df -h

. I bet you'll find your root partition at 100%. The filesystem applies a 'pad' to the declated filesystem sizes to ensure that the system doesn't get completely locked by entirely filling a partition (you can adjust the size by tuning your filesystem). Run as root, pacman will happily eat into this, X won't. Therefore, X can't write to the filesystem and so refuses to start.

It's the new packages in the pacman cache that do it.

This happens to me regularly. Either deleting old packages from the pacman cache or moving it to a partition with more space solves the issue.

D.

Last edited by DanGray (2012-06-24 03:17:20)

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