Hi,

I just took the big plunge and did an "auto-upgrade" from old reliable R4V5 to R5A16. So far, after a couple of bumps, it is going pretty good. All of my family's shows were saved! I will write up a brief report on what happened. Thanks to all who make KnoppMyth great!

I do have one question though and after searching around, I see it is discussed quite a bit but I did not see a very clear answer...

Is it safe to #apt-get upgrade on a R5A16 system?

I know on R4V5 this was absolutely forbidden and would almost certainly hose your system but I seem to recall that R5 series was going to add the ability to use apt-get upgrade. I am not asking about apt-get dist-upgrade since that seems fairly clear from the forums as a bad thing.

Can someone help me out here?

Thanks!

Andrew Lynch

PS, if this is a FAQ please point me in the right direction because I can't find it.

HI lynchaj,

I am not your best source for this answer, however I would think it best to error on the side of caution. Since you have recordings and seem to be glad they were intact, it may not be good to gamble.

There was a comment on another thread that mentioned doing an upgrade and didn't seem to work out well for him.
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=5660
There have been some other changes that seem to affect the system also so procede carefully with additions.

Just my pennys worth
Mike

Yes, it is safe. However KnoppMyth is based on Debian unstable which does break from time to time. KnoppMyth is designed to be used as a PVR. If you don't need to apt-get upgrade ( I don't know why one would want to...), don't. The simple point is why touch something that works? I imagine that is why you stuck w/ R4 for so long.

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

Yep, I am the nervous sort. That's is why I asked before doing it!

The upgrade did go well overall but there were a couple of gotchas in there. My motherboard decided to play "hide the keyboard" as soon as linux booted which was a bit distressing. Quick BIOS setting fixed that.

Of course my funky mixed PVR-250s caused headaches too. The thing that absolutely did not have any problem with though was the LVM stores for /myth. Wow, that backup, auto upgrade and restore was slick!

Thanks!

Andrew Lynch

Hi,
Another word of caution is don't install firefox. It does apear to cause an error during startup. We will have to be patient until cesman can look into it as it has to do with the stable change. (if it works into his priorities)

I just spent 40 minutes doing an upgrade and this time only installed mozilla. All worked well, I did the mozilla install while watching Leno, tweaked mozilla and set home page as localhost/mythweb/recorded_programs.php and yes it was all there. Went to my tunes, clicked on a selection, set /usr/bin/xine as the default tool and was playing music while watching Leno all on the same machine at the same time, all in less than an hour! I just love Knoppix R5A16!

Hardware:
e-machine +1600 1.3 ghtz
384 meg mem
300 gig Seagate ($99 after rebates sale)
on board network
onboard audio
R5A16

What else can I say?
Mike

I know I messed up my recent knoppmyth R5A16 install when I tried an apt-get upgrade.

I had attributed the issue with me not being proficient with Debian more than anything else. And the few Debian friends I have were giving me advice like "When I see apt start blowing off errors, I just reinstall from scratch." Which can't be the right answer.

But with knoppmyth, at least it is an easy answer.

-Aubrey

Hi alewman,

I may not have been clear, the upgrade I did was an auto upgrade from the cd, not the apt-get upgrade. (a reinstall of knoppmyth)

Mike

Huh? What's wrong with Firefox? I've got it installed with R5A16 and I don't seem to be having any problems.

Hi gummybear,

If you have firefox already installed from earlier than a few days / week ago it should be fine. I'm not even a %100 sure that it is the cause of the problem. The problem is that you receive a complaint the wallpaper is bad which seems to start after you install firefox and you have switched the sources.list to be stable. The problem will show up immediately on a mythfrontend restart.

I did a reinstall (auto upgrade) and did everything I normally do including installing mozilla, except didn't install firefox and all went well. No errors. I'll poke some more later to be sure it wasn't caused by thunderbird install.

I try to be clear in what I say here so as not to confuse things, however sometimes it may not be as clear as I think .

Mike

I did this accidentally and had to reinstall from scratch.

My system got fairly messed up during the conversion process and debugging with all the hardware issues I had (new motherboard, keyboard, PVR-250's, DVD, etc) that I decided to go ahead and do a mythbackup and reinstall from scratch.

Of course the curiousity was killing me and with all the important stuff like the database, settings, videos, and recorded shows were preserved, so I went did the "apt-get update && apt-get upgrade" to see if it would work.

In short, no

I strongly recommend not doing that. If you do, make sure you do a mythbackup before you try it because you are probably going to have to do a reinstall from scratch.

So I went ahead and did the reinstall and since I kept notes from the first install the second install went extremely well and worked out just great. Of course it found all the hardware this time which helps a lot. Now I have a fresh install of R5A16 without all the hardware weirdness AND all the data was preserved. Everyone is happy and my curiousity satisfied.

I strongly recommend DO NOT "apt-get upgrade" unless you are prepared to do a reinstall from scratch!

Andrew Lynch

I was thinking about this again last night and I wondered if "apt-get upgrade" would work if the /etc/apt/sources.list were changed from debian "unstable" to debian "stable".

Debian did release a "stable" version after R5A16 came out so in theory the "stable" packages are probably later than the ones used in R5A16. Being "stable" they would probably less likely to hose the system too.

I did a little experiment with my R5A16 box and changed the debian sources in /etc/apt/sources from "unstable" to "stable" and did an "apt-get upgrade" but when it asked [Y/n] I said no and exited. Apt said that it could upgrade like 300+ packages, significantly less than the 400+ packages that were updated when using debian "unstable". Of those packages, I'd bet most of those were older than the "unstable" variety and less likely to contain recent bugs to hose the system.

At this point my system has stabilized and I am going to be adding a new HDTV tuner so I am not going to mess with this any further. However, if someone had a freshly installed R5A16 box, were willing to do a reinstall if it got hosed, and were willing to do a little experimenting, I am sure several folks here would be interested in the results.

Thanks!

Andrew Lynch

I'm on R5A15 with mythtv compiled from svn (built around mid-July 2005). Well, today I had some spare time and managed to stuff something up with a few apt-get commands, and now my box is severely broken. I think I stuffed libqt3 and can't even re-compile.

Anyways, I'm trying apt-get upgrade now, and maybe I re-compiling might work after that??

I'll post the result later ..

I'm interested if anybody has any suggestions/comments ..

apt-get upgrade downloaded all the archives and started installing things. then it exited abnormally somewhere ...

since i'm already taking a huge risk, i decided to do a dpkg -i --force-overwrite /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb

okay, everything installed but my qt3 is still stuffed ... can't compile mythtv from source ... looks like i need libqt3-mt-dev

apt-get install libqt3-mt-dev

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
libqt3-mt-dev: Depends: xlibs-static-dev (>= 4.3.0.dfsg.1-4) but it is not going to be installed
E: Broken packages

so then:

apt-get install xlibs-static-dev

xlibs-static-dev: Depends: libxv-dev but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libx11-dev but it is not going to be installed
E: Broken packages

UGHHHH!!

might try building qt from scratch ... http://www.trolltech.com/download/qt/x11.html

no good

try change /etc/apt/sources.list from unstable to stable ....

no good ...

everything's broken ... ughhh

ahhh f*#k it ... re-install knoppmyth

nite ...