Arch Linux

almigi

Member

Registered: 2009-07-24

Posts: 6

Question about doing upgrades

This is a pretty basic question, but still one that I am curious about. Let's say I have Arch installed and I'm doing a "pacman -Syu" to update everything on my system.  Is it ok to do it from say, the terminal in Gnome or Konsole in KDE?  I guess the question is if I'm in Gnome or KDE and a new version of Xorg, or even KDE or Gnome itself is downloaded and installed, will this cause issues (since I'm using the very programs/services that are being updated while they are being updated)?  Is it recommended to <alt>-F2 to another console, kill x, and do upgrades that way?

Thanks.

- Al

Pierre

Developer

From: Bonn

Registered: 2004-07-05

Posts: 1,964

Website

Re: Question about doing upgrades

As an easy rule: Don't upgrade any program that is running atm.

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almigi

Member

Registered: 2009-07-24

Posts: 6

Re: Question about doing upgrades

As an easy rule: Don't upgrade any program that is running atm.

Sensible advice.

Now, my next question is, if I want to kill X in order to pull in an upgrade of X, is going to a different console and doing a

# init 3

the way to go?  Will this kill X as well as any program dependent on it (i.e. Gnome, KDE, etc...)?  Or is there a better method?

majiq

Member

Registered: 2009-03-06

Posts: 259

Re: Question about doing upgrades

Well...what if you're updating, say, your shell or the kernel or readline? You're using them at the moment regardless of whether a virtual terminal or terminal emulator is used. In my experience, updating with gnome-terminal has never led to a problem in that way, and I'm guessing it's because by that time the programs are loaded into memory and don't really reference their images on the disk, I'm guessing.

Anyway, yes, init or telinit is probably the way to go.

Edit: Otherwise, as in if you put gdm as a daemon, you can run

/etc/rc.d/gdm stop

and then kill the X server if it's still running if you want to stay in runlevel 5.

Last edited by majiq (2009-07-24 16:22:23)

Pierre

Developer

From: Bonn

Registered: 2004-07-05

Posts: 1,964

Website

Re: Question about doing upgrades

Sure there are exceptions where it does work. But posting a list of hundered of packages wasn't that simple.

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