Kongoni upgrade howto: Nietszche

Kongoni Upgrade howto: Nietszche

This howto is intended to teach you the various ways you can upgrade an earlier version of kongoni to version 1.12.2, also known as Nietszche. There are a few approaches one can take so we will look at them in turn.

As a general piece of advice, we continue to recommend mounting /home on it's own partition as that allows for the easiest upgrade path of all. This guide should work for upgrading from any previous release: baseline1, Aristotle or Sophocles.

Clean reinstall the OS:

This approach is by far the easiest approach. It does however come at a price, none of your settings or add-on software can be preserved and will need to be reinstalled.  By far the best way to do a clean-install upgrade is to have /home mounted on a seperate partition, this way your user data is safely out of the way and you can simply reformat the root filesystem and replace the operating system with Sophocles during the install.

 If you wish to follow this approach but you did not put /home on it's own partition during your initial install, you can still protect your data this way by moving it to one. Boot from the Sophocles live CD and fire up gparted:

Alt+F2
kdesu gparted

 Now shrink your root partition till there's enough for user data, create a new partition and format it as a linux partition (you can safely use ext2,ext3 or reiserfs but ext3 remains the recommended one for Sophocles). This process can take several hours.

Now boot back into your old system, and mount the new partition somewhere. Then use this code to clone your home directories to it. For this example I'm assuming you mounted the partition as /mnt/home

cd /home
find . | cpio -pvd /mnt/newhome

Reboot and boot back into the livecd. Now start the installer, format the root filesystem but do not format the new home filesystem and install as if it was a new installation.

Dirty Upgrade Installation:

This approach is similar to the above but a little easier and work even if you have your home directory on the same partition as root. It preserves any new files created, but does override all files that are newer. This could and probably will include most of you /etc config files etc.

Normally the method will replace your desktop settings, reverting you to the default (though application settings should be preserved) but if you have a separate home you can prevent this by not mounting it during install and manually mounting it back later (after cleaning out the generated content of /home).

In all cases, this method will leave you to redo some of your configs and prehaps reinstall one or two programs but it's a lot smoother than the above. On the other hand, it can cause corruption or other problems so make a full backup before attempting it.

To do a dirty upgrade, boot from the live CD and start the installer, when the partitioner opens, just close it without making any changes. Now mount your filesystems as they were before, and then install the system on top of the existing one.

This process would not work with most package systems because the package databases would get overriden, but because Kongoni uses the slackware system which has seperate files for each package in the package log, it  does work. The downside is that it now incorrectly lists both the versions of packages in Sophocles and the versions you had before. Your best defense against this is to do a full portpkg update before running it as this will minimize the differences.

Please note that the file copy process in the installer will detect your old system and repeatedly ask you to confirm what your are doing. At the top of each directory the dialog will have a "Write into all" button, click that, on the first file in each directory you will be asked to confirm the overwrite, choose "Overwrite all" on those dialogs. There will be about 5 of these.

Ports Based Rolling Upgrade:

This method is now the recommended default way of upgrading. It provides a very stable method of upgrading while preserving all settings and additional software. However, being a complex process it is not perfect and may require some manual intervention. Any such interventions are in fact bugs and should please be reported.This method should generally work well because it's the same method we use to update between versions for the official ISO's. As a bonus, you don't need to obtain an ISO first (though the actual download size may in fact be larger than the ISO depending on how recently you updated an earlier release).

Sophocles introduced the kongoni port which automates almost the entire upgrade process, with Nietszche this port has come into it's own and now works almost perfectly.

To upgrade your system using the kongoni port you can run the following in an x-console (xterm or konsole):

portpkg -n kongoni

Or simply use PIG to do it for you.

The kongoni package is only updated after an official ISO release so it will only ever be installable/upgradeable when a new release is installed. It always depends on all the core kongoni programs as well as the all the packages in the standard ISO and will update /etc/kongoni-version for you. This upgrades your entire base operating system to the level of the current kongoni package (matched to the latest ISO).

Please note that the kongoni port is partially interactive, and requires some build processes that means it cannot run on a pure console login, it has to be built from inside a running desktop environment.

Once the kongoni port has finished installing it is a good idea (though optional) to also upgrade any additional software you have loaded to the latest versions. This command will do that (or you can use PIG and just click "Upgrade All"):

portpkg -n -u

When you're done with these steps, it's highly recommended that you reboot to ensure boot-services, kernel upgrades etc. take effect.

Updating desktop artwork

Since most of the desktop themes did not exist in pre-Sophocles releases, merely upgrading their files will not activate them for you even if you have the defaults enabled. If you would like to have the official kongoni default themes active, this process will help you do that.

First run systemsettings (you can find it on the main men or run it as a command).

Open up Appearance.

Now click on Colors and select: WontonSoupBrown

Apply.

Click on Splash Screen and select: Kongoni

Apply.

Close systemsettings.

Now right click on the Desktop and Choose "Appearance Settings",

change the  wallpaper to Kongoni

Change the plasma theme to Perfection

Now we need to rerun systemsettings as root:

Alt+F2

kdesu systemsettings

Go to the Advanced Tab

Click Login Manager

Click the Theme tab

Select "Kongoni"

That is, you now have not only an up-to-date Sophocles version of Kongoni, but an up-to-date Desktop as well. Enjoy playing with Sophocles and please post feedback in the comments section here to help us improve this guide before the next release.