KDE 4.9.5 Upgrade Method

[GreggB]

I saw the announcement that the 4.9.5 upgrade was available, but I don't remember seeing anything prescribing how the upgrade should be done.

I presume that if I go into Synaptic and do "Mark All Upgrades" I will get 4.9.5 and anything else that happens to have been updated.

Is there a package I can select that will just do the 4.9.5 upgrade?

Thanks,
Gregg.

BTW - Currently on 4.9.2

[DeBaas]

Just do your regular update in Synaptic and you are on 4.9.5

[YouCanToo]

I saw the announcement that the 4.9.5 upgrade was available, but I don't remember seeing anything prescribing how the upgrade should be done.

I presume that if I go into Synaptic and do "Mark All Upgrades" I will get 4.9.5 and anything else that happens to have been updated.

Is there a package I can select that will just do the 4.9.5 upgrade?

Thanks,
Gregg.

BTW - Currently on 4.9.2

It has always been recommended that the user does a full update and not pick and choose the packages.  Doing partial updates/upgrades will soon cause issues with your system.  Be smart DON'T DO PARTIAL UPDATES/UPGRADES.

[agmg]

KDE 4.9.5 has been available for quite some time now...

I wonder...
You just haven't updated your system all that time or did you just do selective/partial updates like YouCanToo wrote?
In either case, you have exposed your system in great risk and increased the possibilies of breaking it...

[GreggB]

You just haven't updated your system all that time or did you just do selective/partial updates like YouCanToo wrote?
In either case, you have exposed your system in great risk and increased the possibilies of breaking it

I have to disagree... I used to maintain an OS for a living, and know that the real risk is in applying updates to a working system. One of my early experiences with PCLinuxOS bares this out. About a month after I installed 2012.02, a KDE update came along (4.8 I think) - it messed up my desktop and none of the recovery steps in the forums would bring it back to the way it was. Similarly, with the 2012.08 kernel update, I lost my fan and temperature sensors. Neither of these issues was a "big deal" for me, but I see too many forum post along the lines of "I updated X and now Y doesn't work".

Consequently, I now apply more of my professional experience to my OS updates (I consider KDE part of the OS). The most important point being - never update the live system. So I've been waiting 'till I had time duplicate my system partition to apply the KDE upgrade. The whole procedure turned out to be easier than I thought, so I won't be leaving it as long next time.

Gregg.

[agmg]

I have to agree with you to some degree.

When using a rolling operating system you always face the risk of breaking something at some point.
No matter how hard the packagers work to ensure quality and stability, they are humans messing with computers.
They make mistakes sometimes. Users are humans too. They also make mistakes.

Quoting Albert Einstein:

"Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid.
Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate, and brilliant.
Together they are powerful beyond imagination."

Frequent backups are obligatory.
PCLinuxOS has also the outstanding tool for creating your own remaster of your installed system.
What more could you ask? Make a backup before a major update, and if things mess up, you can easily restore your backup.
I think it's wiser than making selective/partial updates or waiting too long to update your system...

[shimonl]

Like GreggB I worked (30 years) as a system maintainer (mainframe). In my wildest
dreams (nightmares?) I would not have done things I do on my home system.

And I also agree with agmg, that frequent backups are definitely in order.
My problem is that I am not aware of good *online* backup tools.
I can make a disk image from a bootable CD, but that requires a total shutdown,
which I don't really enjoy... ;-)

agmg, you mentioned a 'remaster of your installed system'. Can you elaborate on that please?
what exactly does it do, and what program runs it? I don't see anything in my FM menus
that looks like that, but there are so many things here I don't recognize, it's no surprise.

Thanks very much!
Shimon

[µT6]

the probabilities of having problems with selective updates are higher than with applying normal updates

the rule on pclinux is apply all updates

a rule on your system should be keep backups of your important files

if this rules gives you problem, well, we can't help you much then

[agmg]

I find it strange that you don't know about "remaster" or "mylivecd".
You can do a search for these terms in the forum, you will find numerous threads.

mylivecd is a custom command-line tool built by Textar and etjr.
It makes a clone of your installed system to a bootable medium.
This medium can then be used for a reinstallation or a new installation on a different system.
It will contain all applications you have installed and all customizations made at the time of the remastering.

You can access it from terminal by typing: mylivecd --help

There is also a very useful tutorial on our Magazine, written by AndrejL:

http://pclosmag.com/html/Issues/201209/page12.html

[GreggB]

When it comes to "selective updates", I consider updating stand-alone applications (browser, office, etc.) pretty safe.

I did consider the Live CD approach, but prefer the way have things set up now (more like what I would have done on the M/F). I have two 30GB PCLinuxOS partitions, a swap and a data partition. PCLinuxOS is set up with the home directory on the system partition; the home folder contains only KDE and application configuration files.

I have a commercial boot manager/ imaging tool - so at upgrade time, I just re-boot, copy the "live" OS partition to the other (takes about 5 minutes) then boot the newly refreshed partition and apply the updates.

Even though I use commercial software (which I've used for a long time) - I'm assuming something similar could be done with FOSS.

Gregg.

[kjpetrie]

mylivecd is a perl script which creates an installer without shutting down. It's a very useful tool.

Upgrading individual applications is very unsafe, because dependencies change and it's not the way pclos is designed to be used. The rpm dependency system has its limitations, and circular dependencies can result if all possible dependencies are included in every package, so packagers pick and choose and rely to some extent on simultaneity of release to ensure compatibility. This is particularly important when interdependent packages are upgraded, such as KDE and QT.

If you use pclos for mission critical applications then I would suggest having a test installation on another machine to ensure nothing breaks and to avoid upgrading until you know it won't have a negative effect, but partial upgrading is simply misuse of the upgrade process and will lead to trouble sooner or later. As you are a system maintainer you will probably be better qualified than most to sort the problem out, which is just as well because your system will be unsupported here.

[wayne1932]

My solution to the risk that updating can cause is this:

My disk has separate partitions for  (1) MyMusic (2) MyDocuments (3) MyPictures and (4)MyMiscellaneous. 

Haven't lost anything serious since  I did this. AND all these are backed up occasionally to another harddrive.  Belt and Suspenders.

[GreggB]

Upgrading individual applications is very unsafe

I'm not disputing the validity of this statement - but I just don't understand why it is so. Unless for example, the following is true: If a FireFox update comes out on Monday and library update comes out on Tuesday, it is still safe to update only FireFox on Wednesday, but it wouldn't be safe to apply an Opera update the came out on Thursday before applying Monday and Tuesday's updates. (hope that makes sense).

Either way, sounds like I need to tweak my update strategy.

Gregg.

[µT6]

it is simple, we all follow the same rules, we all share the same installation conditions and that can be used to determine problems in common between many users

if your install is not in the same condition as others we will have a hard time trying to help you and probably will fail at doing it

also this is a rolling release distro, we don't have much rules to follow than keep system updated and not to use packages form unknown sources unless it is strictly necessary, it is not that hard to do, i have done it for 6 years without much issues

[gseaman]

Upgrading individual applications is very unsafe

I'm not disputing the validity of this statement - but I just don't understand why it is so. Unless for example, the following is true: If a FireFox update comes out on Monday and library update comes out on Tuesday, it is still safe to update only FireFox on Wednesday, but it wouldn't be safe to apply an Opera update the came out on Thursday before applying Monday and Tuesday's updates. (hope that makes sense).

Either way, sounds like I need to tweak my update strategy.

Gregg.

The packagers try to create rpms that can work in all reasonable situations, but there are many combinations of factors in which the rpm system will fail. Since we cannot test every situation, we recommend that you use the same combination that we all have, so that we can successfully solve any problems that occur. Your strategy is sound for Debian or Redhat. In exchange for following this path, we try really hard to prevent any new packages from disturbing your installs. It still happens, but is usually fixed in hours or days.

Galen