[mythtv-users] Best update path from Fedora 6

[Andrew Burgess]

On Sat, 2009-03-28 at 12:31 +0100, Niels Dybdahl wrote:

> I have not touched my MythTV installation for a long time (it worked
> well...).
> Now Google Calendar will no longer support Firefox 1.5, so I guess I
> have to upgrade.

If that's your only motivation have you considered compiling firefox
from source? It might involve installing alot of the dependencies from
source too since I would imagine current fc6 rpms are scarce.

> I am running Fedora 6 and MythTV 0.20 backend/frontend from atrpms.
> The PC is also running two mediawikis.
> I am considering one of the following:
> 
> 1. Try to do a yum-update from Fedora 6 to Fedora 10
> 2. Install the Fedora 10 DVD on top of my existing installation.

Two choices for #2 - upgrade or new install, though I'll bet no one
tested upgrading from fc6 to fc10. Might be safer (and more tedious) to
do the upgrade sequentially (7,8,9,10). Once doing a fedora upgrade it
didn't work for me and I had to do a fresh install - I don't recall the
version numbers.

Save the whole existing root partition or (better) do the fresh install
on a spare disk or partition, then you can always examine the old setup
or even boot it. I would advise this for all the other options too. Then
when you get tired of messing with it you can always switch back to what
worked and try again tomorrow ;-)

Sometimes fedora will mash your other boot configurations so save them
somewhere. Have another computer handy with internet access so you can
learn about boot managers when it refuses to boot.

> 3. Install MythDora
> 4. Switch to MythBuntu

No experience

> But I am nervous about one issue: What happens with my mysql databases
> (MythTV and MediaWiki)? I have backups, but will the new versions of
> MythTV and MySQL automatically update them properly?

Smaller version jumps have always worked fine for me. A db backup makes
it a safe experiment for you. Worst case you'd have to install
intermediate versions but I'd bet it works in one jump. Just my guess,
others will know for sure.

> As far as I have read an installation of the Fedora 10 DVD will almost
> wipe out my currently installed programs, so I guess I will have to
> install MythTV from scratch afterwards. But can MythTV handle an old
> database when it is not installed as an update but from scratch? Would
> I have to do something special to handle this case?

You'd have to copy the old db from /var/lib{myth*,mysql} onto the new
filesystem. Another argument to keep the old setup pristene while you
experiment

> Using yum all the way through would probably solve the update problem
> of the databases, but I guess there will be a lot of version conflicts
> that have to be resolved, if possible at all.

Yeah, it would be really impressive if yum could do it.

HTH