Is there any online document with step by step instructions for upgrading from Mepis 7 to Mepis 8?

I assume Mepis 8 is very easy to install on a new computer (Mepis 7 was). So I would know how to blow away everything I have on that computer and install Mepis 8.

But what is practical to preserve and how can I preserve it?

For example, I assume I would be installing a newer build, mabe newer version, of Firefox when I install Mepis 8. How do I preserve bookmarks, etc.?

Should I wait for it to be really official? I'm not worried about the risk of a few bugs because it is new, just about whether there will be a second big upgrade when it becomes official (vs. the simple process of updating in synaptic).

I also wouldn't mind some step by step for the mechanics of getting it. I've never tried a large download to Linux nor burning a CD or DVD. I could use a bit torrent to my son's Windows system (because I can't seem to get any large ftp or http downloads to work through my internet provider) to download, then ImgBurn on my Windows system to burn (as I did for all the Linux CDs and DVDs I've tried so far). But that seems lame.

What programs should I install/run in Mepis 7 to download and burn Mepis 8?

But my main question is what is practical to preserve when upgrading and how.

Upgrading 7 to 8 using the repos is possible but is pretty much a process of breaking your system then hacking away at it to get it back to 'normal'. I tried to upgrade my M7 once RC 1 of Mepis 8 came out but ended up using the M8 CD I'd burned prior to my attempt (Just in case...) to re-install preserving /home (On a seperate partition.) which worked a charm! I spent probably in total a couple of hours tweaking and now have a very nice almost final release M8!

Basically, upgrading from Etch to Lenny seems to break KDE. You can, as I mentioned, get it back (Apparently...) by using dpkg with the force option. Adrian over at Mepislovers has posted his suggestion for getting M7 'lennyfied' in a couple of threads.

If you have the HD space, the time, & the knowledge, I would consider cloning your M7 to a new partition & install M8 over it (i.e. the new partition) w/ the preserve /home option. -- I'm assuming the preserve /home option is still part of M8.

Other things you might want to do:

• Document your currently installed packages w/ dpkg -l or dpkg --get-selections, or both.
• Back up your Master Boot Record (MBR). (Use dd).
• Back up your entire M7 partition.
• Document your partitioning scheme w/ sfdisk -d

* * *
johnsfine,

A number of questions you have asked.

A. Mepis 8 will be easy to install on most computers, on a new or used computer... With the cost of hard drives reasonable maybe getting a new one for Mepis 8 is not out of the question for your existing system. In a desktop this is easy to to open the case and add a new drive.

B. The Official release of Mepis 8 is complete, but it has not arrived in the public mirrors. The people that have purchased it from the store, are always given a few days before it goes public.
www.mepis.org/store

C. If your internet provider will not let you download, you could use your son's internet provider to accomplish the download with Firefox, or Konqueror. I use Deluge in Mepis 7 for torrent downloads, but Ktorrent works well and is easy to install from synaptic if you have not installed this torrent software already. If moving your system to your son's place for this download is impractical then download using a torrent software on his computer system when (2 days) Mepis 8 becomes available. Move the file to a USB memory stick/drive, and then move it from the USB memory stick/drive to your computer. Then burn the Mepis 8 ISO with K3B (open K3b, and locate the Mepis 8 file and K3b will detect it as a ISO file and burn the file correctly) I always burn at the slowest rate, just to be certain I have a good burn...

I would always preserve your home partition, if you have a new hard drive then you could keep your mepis 7 intact, and then if you have forgotten to get info you could always change the hard drive around and be running mepis 7 as quick as you change the hard drive configeration in your desktop system...

Then what about saving your Konqueror/Firefox/Opera bookmarks, your e-mail addresses (Thunderbird or Kmail) Your newgroup list Pan/KNode... Have you any downloaded, ripped music, films, photos, wallpapers, and maybe some gimp or Xara Xtreme graphic projects you are working on, and please do not forget your word processor/spreadsheet documents.

Hopefully I am not forgetting anything...

JR

Not practical nor necessary in my case.

My son lives with me. Same internet provider, just a different computer and he has bit torrent software installed. The internet provider just messes up large ftp and http file transfers. No problem with torrent other than I never got around to installing torrent software on any of my own computers.

I'll look for those in synaptic tonight. Any suggestion for what I use to burn the .iso to CD (or is there a DVD version available with more on it)? ImgBurn for Windows is so easy and idiot proof, I'm spoiled.

The power of procrastination! I got busy with other tasks, so now I don't need to know whether getting it pre release is a good idea.

I have excessively big partitions on an excessively big hard drive and I know how to use a liveCD to resize and move partitions. So I can preserve everything that way if I want to. I'm less sure I would know how to make any use of whatever I preserve.

I have no clue how to copy Konqueror settings. I guess it is easier to just redo them (which I also don't remember how, but it wasn't so hard the first time). Firefox and Thunderbird profiles are more important to copy and I don't really know how to do so in Linux (I've figured that out with difficulty in Windows).
I should figure out how to get a list of installed packages from Synaptic out to text file, so I can diff that against the new system and start duplicating the collection of installed software.

Anything that is my own work is easy to find and copy. The hard part is things like settings and cookies and passwords in FireFox, etc.

johnsfine,
I agree with the other posters who recommend a fresh install of Mepis 8 Final.
Is there an internet cafe nearby which allows the downloading and burning to disk of the M8 iso?
Is there a Linux Users Group nearby or do you know anybody who uses Linux?
That would at least get you the iso burned to CD and ready for installation.
Always check the md5sum for the integrity of the download.

You can save your current bookmarks in a .html file (ready for export) which you can put on a flash drive/pen drive. Then copy this file to, say, your NEW Desktop and from there, import the bookmarks.html file to Firefox 3.

johnsfine,
As mentioned before, a fresh install of M8 is the best way to proceed.
Follow the advice above with regard to saving important Documents, Photos etc.
With regard to migrating Thunderbird from M7 to M8, I suggest you do the following (it is a very straightforward procedure but a lengthy description).

It is necessary to identify Thunderbird's unique default profile directory in M7. First, make sure TB is CLOSED, then click on your M7 Home icon in the bottom toolbar > View > Show Hidden Files > .mozilla-thunderbird > (example) zyk2np7w.default
(in the /home/myoldusername/.mozilla-thunderbird directory).
Note its name and copy this default file onto a memory stick or similar.

Once M8 has been installed, copy this file (zyk2np7w.default) into the new M8 .thunderbird directory (/home/mynewusername/.thunderbird). Note the difference, there is no mozilla prefix this time.

Now start TB on M8, ignoring questions from a wizard (exit the wizard) and then CLOSE TB. Now go, via Home > View > Show Hidden Files, to .thunderbird in your M8 home directory and you will see a new default profile directory, (example) ug2fpw4n.default.

The earlier zyk2np7w.default must replace the ug2fpw4n.default in
/home/mynewusername/.thunderbird/profiles.ini

When you click on profiles.ini you should see 7 lines of text, ending in
Path=ug2fpw4n.default . Just to be safe, copy this file to a memory stick before proceeding further.
Click on “Edit” which opens the text editor, KWrite.
(Edit > Go To Line > Select 7)
Now type # in front of Path=ug2fpw4n.default. (So that line 7 now reads
#Path=ug2fpw4n.default).
Then on the line underneath, type Path=zyk2np7w.default.
Click on File, click on Save (Overwrite? -Yes) and exit.
Restart TB.
All your old emails, address book entries, mail account settings should have migrated successfully to Mepis 8.

johnsfine,
Torrents for SimplyMEPIS 8.0.00 are up on LinuxTracker;
32 bit: http://linuxtracker.org/index.php?pa...b5bfc71a921fad

64bit:http://linuxtracker.org/index.php?pa...93048bb787df27

Wayne

Large file transfers are sometimes corrupted by interruptions etc and that is exactly why Debian always recommends the use of a Download Manager for their .iso downloads.

Since using d4x (Downloader 4 X) in conjunction with FlashGot (a Firefox add-on), I have never had a corrupted download.

d4x can be downloaded and installed via Synaptic. You may need to enable some additional repositories in Synaptic first. Kmenu > System > Package Manager/Synaptic > Settings > Repositories. Tick or check the boxes for additional repos. Click on “Reload”.
Once the updates are finished, type d4x in Synaptic's “Search” box then Mark for Installation, Mark, Apply, Apply. d4x is now installed.

When you click on the 32 bit M8 .iso from a mirror site you will be asked how Firefox should deal with this file.
Highlight the FlashGot button and then select Downloader 4 X.
Click on OK. In the d4x window click OK again to start the download.
I am assuming that your downloads go to either Desktop or MyDownloads.
When you use K3b to burn the downloaded .iso you just need to locate the download and highlight it. It will probably be in the K3b window, ready and waiting.
Good luck.

Edit: I'm editing more details into this post as I accomplish things.

After further procrastination, a progress report (might contain useful hints for others trying a reinstall for the first time).

0) Preparation: I did that dpkg -l and dpkg --get-selections Rick suggested (dpkg -l is plenty, the second one doesn't seem to add anything for this purpose). I checked the partitions and found that some early experiment I never cleaned up left room to install another Linux without disturbing the current one. I didn't figure out all the further prep work I should have done, I'm still working on that.

1) Downloading: I checked that ktorrent was already installed. I clicked the link in Wayne's post. Firefox does not know to launch ktorrent (I expect something could be configured for that if I wanted to do a lot of these). So I saved the .torrent file then clicked on it in Konqueror which did know what to launch. Then ktorrent downloaded the .iso file with no problems.

2) Burning: I didn't recall what to use for burning a CD (never burned one on Linux before). Before researching that, I tried clicking on the .iso file. That brought up K3b, which computed the Md5 Sum and had the text "Please insert an empty CD-R(W) medium" in the middle of the window. So I did. That enabled the start button and then burning the CD was quick and easy. (I still prefer ImgBurn in Windows, but K3b is less confusing than most of the Windows CD burning programs I've tried).

3) Booting the CD: That was a problem because the Gigabyte motherboard I bought for this Linux system has an absolutely horrible BIOS. I got through that with much frustration but nothing of general interest.

4) Starting Linux from CD: I used the VESA choice because the default video didn't work on this system in Mepis 7 and I didn't want to experiment and need to restart.

5) Used GParted to check the partitions were all numbered the same as I saw in Mepis 7. I had been planning to resize my big nearly empty partition to make room, but I had two extra partitions already.

6) Mepis install is, of course, fast and easy. I read the prompts carefully to make sure I was installing into the correct preexisting partitions (the two spare ones, not the Mepis 7 ones). The one install question I'm unsure about was domain. My home network is a windows workgroup, not a domain. Mepis seems to want both, so I put in nonsense for the domain. It rebooted into Mepis 8 on the hard drive with no problems.

7) Re customization: I'm just beginning to remind myself how many things have been customized while I've been using Mepis 7. This is going to be a serious project. This time I'll keep a log of customization so it will be easier the third time.

7a) DHCP: I don't know why my home router hates this computer. In Mepis 7, DHCP was always very slow and often failed, needing a reboot to try again. So I switched to a fixed IP address solving all that and making Mepis 7 start much faster. But of course I forgot what I changed where. Later I'll search LQ for it, because I discussed it here. Meanwhile DHCP worked two out of two tries for Mepis 8, but even slower than I remember.
Edit: I found the URL of the advice I got at LQ the first time:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...29#post3244029

7b) /boot/grub/menu.lst: First thing I re customized. I mounted sda2 and opened /mnt/sda2/boot/grub/menu.lst (my old one) and the new /boot/grub/menu.lst and copied a chunk from the old one to the new one, grub in the new one can boot the old Mepis 7. (In fact I'm back on Mepis 7 typing this, pending a lot more tweaks to my Mepis 8 install). I also put "nosplash" on all the entries and took out quiet. I hate splash screens. I want to see the details scroll by.

7c) Nvidia: I used the Mepis X Windows assistant to install the Nvidia driver.

I normally edit xorg.conf anyway on Linux systems, even if Mepis X Windows assistant gets it working "well enough". Later I'll diff the automatically generated xorg.conf in Mepis 8 to my last manually created one in Mepis 7 and make decisions about the differences. Any time you get a manually edited xorg.conf working well (or even a little better than your last try, even if you still want to tweak it further) BACK IT UP. The few times I've forgotten that, I've regretted it.

7d) Fonts: I have a 28 inch LCD (not working at the moment, which is very frustrating) that I was using when I installed Mepis 7. Max res is 1920x1200 and that really isn't enough for 28 inch. Most fonts and any anti aliasing looks terrible when the pixels are that large, so I had turned off anti aliasing (making good fonts look better and bad fonts look much worse) then I installed and uninstalled fonts until everything looked OK. I had no clue what I was doing in that process and forgot what little I figured out. If I get that 28 inch LCD working again I expect I need to change fonts again.

7e) Firefox and Thunderbird already discussed above, but I haven't done it yet. In Windows I've always ported those between side by side computers, not between dual boot of one computer. Side by side is much easier, because you can use the old one for viewing the instructions for use on the new one. I might need to print out some instructions (or maybe copy/paste to an ordinary text document). It's hard to use Firefox to read instructions for setting up Firefox.

7f) Konqueror: In Mepis 7, it took me a while to figure out how to make that always come up with a full folder tree on the left and detail view on the right. Of course I forget how. So as I do basic customization tasks, I'm using Konqueror in a mode that is much less effective for me. I reset those same things in Windows file explorer so often on so many computers, I have every detail burned into my memory. I don't understand why anyone would want a file explorer defaulting to big icons rather than an organized list of names, nor why you would want to hide the folder tree. I half remember I customized a bunch of other Konqueror behaviors. I guess I'll rediscover that when I see other things acting wrong.

7g) General appearance. I hate desktop wall paper. I hate the Mepis 8 background images even more. I'll have to rediscover where you switch that to flat blue. Maybe I'll even need to mess with the background(s) used during booting. I left those alone for Mepis 7. But I really hate the Mepis 8 background.

7h) Everything else. I have tweaked and forgotten a lot of things. It will take a while to rediscover. I better keep good notes this time.

johnsfine,

7g) Kmenu > Settings > Appearance & Themes > Background > Choose from drop-down menu.

Yes, it is a very good idea to keep plenty of notes so that you can follow a procedure or retrace your steps etc.

Normally I hate it when people quote an entire post, especially a long one; but I want to comment on this point by point.

I will try to edit this if new ideas occur to me.

Also, should we make this into an LQ Wiki article?

00) Before I start, let me say that if I were allowed to click the "Thank you" button twice, I would have -- for the 1st time since it was added to LQ.

1st, this post is a fine, if not the best (that I have seen), example of how LQ is supposed to work: solving problem & creating an archive of those solutions.

2nd, it's a great diary of one of those solutions.

dpkg
As you discovered, the "-l" option gives you a nice list of what you have that you can use to make the new installation as nearly identical to old as possible.

The "--get-selections" option allows you to automate that process: Its output is formatted to be correct input to the "--set-selections" option in the new installation -- "all" you have to do is capture the output as text file & port it to the new installation. Once, dpkg --set-selections < packages.list has run on the new installation, the requested packages still must be actually installed. I believe that aptitude install will do this.
Warning -- I haven't done this yet myself. I need confirmation from someone more experienced that my guess is correct.

My bad for not giving a better explanation.

partitions
I am about to go through this process on a 64-bit Shuttle w/ a 500 GB drive. I planned for this when I set up the drive & it would be nice if I blogged my set up.


Since I have already decided to use KDE, this is why I use Konqueror as much as possible & Firefox as little as possible -- KDE is a highly integrated environment & so many things just work as you would like & expect them to when you click on them.


Interesting difference in our experiences -- I never found $0 "Winders" burning s/w that made it easy to burn .iso's, apparently ImgBurn wasn't available in 2005 (http://filehippo.com/download_imgburn/history/). I went all Linux in May 2005. I only use K3b for burning, & if I had to use "Winders" to burn, I would reboot to a Linux live CD w/ the "toram" init option to do it.


No comment necessary. ... except maybe "My sympathies."

OTOH, this does point out that BIOS problems can get it in the way & that a link to how to solve them should be included in any guide to installation.


I can't fault your logic, sometimes I just want to get things working quickly. However, I will probably take the other tack & mess around w/ the video choices at install in order to make sure I can take full advantage of my card & monitor. Also, I probably will still have mess w/ my xorg.conf to get everything I have now.


Saving a [G|Qt]Parted screen shot from the old installation might be helpful. I tend toward CLI tools & probably should have mentioned as a good way to view what you have;
&
to see what partitions are mounted & how full they are.

For another view of the partition structure I use: on a more standard installation try:
I didn't explain in my other post that the value of sfdisk -d is that it "dumps the partitions of a device in a format useful as input to sfdisk", i.e. if you save the output to a text file, you can use it to rebuild your entire partition structure in the event of disaster. A dd of the MBR only saves its partition table & therefore only your primary partitions' structure.


Your confusion over the domain Q should be interesting to Warren & anyone else working to improve the installer or its documentation.


Although there's a lot more to customization than an installed package list, the fact that aptitude logs everything it does should be a good reason to use it; &, more important, pressure the developers of Synaptic, KPackage, & KPackageKit to switch to aptitude instead of apt-get for their .deb back end.

I assume you did not try "cloning your M7 to a new partition & install M8 over it (i.e. the new partition) w/ the preserve /home option" -- that might mitigate this problem. Of course, there will still be customizations that aren't stored in /home, & you will have to re-create those by other means.


This is an interesting side issue, which you might want to start a new thread about. FWIW, I currently use a SmmothWall Express 3 box for my firewall/router/gateway; & for years have used DHCP to assign fixed IP addresses (by MAC address) rather than hassle w/ putting a true static IP on each machine.


As I implied at 5), I use a master GRUB partition & menu whose only job is to chain to the bootloaders in the boot records of the various root partitions. The master menu.lst entries are already there. All I have to do is add a description. I assume that MEPIS 8 will try to detect old installations & that I will need to remove those entries from its menu.lst.

I'm w/ you on wanting the details; however, I usually settle for using whatever access key (ESC, F2, Ctrl-Alt-F1, etc.) is available. Just a matter of taste.


Thanks for the reminder, I should probably try the assistant before I dive into a manual edit of my new xorg.conf.


Would that I could afford one . Good notes on dealing w/ extra large monitors. I hope you get it working, make notes, & post them.


See my cloning comment at 7) -- I think Firefox and Thunderbird conf files are stored in /home.


Again, see my cloning comment at 7) -- I know the Konqueror conf files are stored in /home.

As to big icons; well, they are useful in a photo album. Ditto for no folder tree.

One of the things I am big on is custom keyboard shortcuts, & my recolllection is that they are NOT all stored in /home; so I am going to try to track them down & port them. (I should blog it when I do, but will I make the effort? )

BTW, do you know how to save & load profiles in Konqueror?


Again a matter of taste. I prefer very simple wallpaper -- just a little texture & an unobstrusive reminder of what I'm looking at. Mepis 7 is almost perfect for me, it only lacks a "7.x" in the logo. Thanks for the warning that I may not like what I see in 8. After finding a preview on the web (sorry, didn't save the link), I'll be needing this advice:


Amen.
Amen.

Posted by archtoad6;
This is really something that one needs to be very careful with.
The question is what repositories were used in MEPIS 7.
Also,if you have unofficial backports installed,file conflicts can happen';
One can try to fix this with
Also
So If you use one of these exceptions, set the pin-priority (see man apt_preferences) temporarily to 1001 for all packages from etch, and you should be able to do a safe dist-upgrade too.
Before the upgrade all packages should be updated with the latest versions from etch repositories and then one can inspect the state of all packages on the system usingThe command to show packages with any error/s is Also,one should check if any package is on hold
and if necessary do

Why would I need to restart the pc? I know of many cases in Windows where similar profile switching requires a reboot. But I don't know of any way in Mepis that Thunderbird or Firefox keep profile info in memory when not running. So I think just restarting TB should be enough.

When I actually followed your advice adjusted for Firefox, I logged out and back in again at the point you suggested reboot. Log out in Linux does a pretty complete clean up of your session. Reboot should never be needed for user/application/profile tweaks.
But after thinking about it, I thought even log out shouldn't be needed, so when I followed your advice for TB, I ddn't even log out. It all seems to have worked.

For others trying this (and for myself next time after I've forgotten it all) some details.

My old /home partition still exists as sda5. That makes this sort of thing easier.

1) I started Firefox, then exited it. (that creates the profile)

2) I started Konqueror.

3) In the view menu, I checked "show hidden files"

4) I clicked the star on the left for "services", then expanded "Storage Media" and identified my old /home partition by size (no other identifying info was visible) and right clicked on it and selected mount). (Any other method of mounting sda5 would have been just as good). Then I left clicked it to display its contents.

5) I clicked my user name "john" and continued down to
media:/sda5/john/.mozilla/firefox

6) I opened another copy of Konqueror and navigated down to
/home/john/.mozilla/firefox

7) I dragged the xkwdowup.default file from the first Konqueror to the second (and selected copy from the pop up menu), and I deleted the old default file in the second one. (The name xkwdowup will be some other random string if you try this yourself).

8) I clicked pluginreg.dat in the old one to see what else I might need to find and copy. It seems to be just QuickTime info, so I decided it was safer to wait until I need QuickTime and reinstall normally, rather than try to port from the old one.

9) I clicked on profiles.ini in the new firefox folder, and edited the Path line to give the name of the .default file I had copied in step 7. Then closed saving the change.

10) I logged out and back in again, which I don't think was needed. Then started Firefox and everything looked OK. I clicked some forums and it properly auto logged me in.

11) I looked for ThunderBird in Mepis8, then opened Synaptic and installed it. I started it, did as little as seemed practical (sorry forget what, but anyway not much and no meaningful answers) to get past the starting dialogs then closed it.

12) I opened Konqueror (similar to steps 2 through 5) navigating to
media:/sda5/john/.mozilla-thunderbird

13) I opened another Konqueror and navigated to
/home/john/.thunderbird
(BTW, thanks for the reassurance that the directory name is supposed to be different).

14) Copied the .default directory as in step 7

15) Edited the profiles.ini file as in step 9

16) I just restarted Thunderbird, no reboot, no log out, no problems.

johnsfine,
I do not know how "restart pc" got in there.
As you say, restart TBird is correct.