[mythtv-users] Major Upgrading...

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sun, 22 Sep 2019 12:12:48 -0500, you wrote:

>So I have a really old version of mythbuntu that has been running fine 
>for a while but I'm thinking it's time to upgrade. As far as I know, 
>there's no upgrade path for mythbuntu any more so I'll probably go for a 
>fresh Ubuntu+Myth install.
>
>What I'm thinking is to do a mysqldump of the mythconverg db, copy the 
>files and the dump to the new system then run the db upgrade script. The 
>thing is, my version of Mythbuntu is really old. It;s actually version 
>12.04. Is this still a viable upgrade path or am I asking for trouble? 
>Any better suggestions?
>
>Rich

Use the mythconverg_backup.pl and mythconverg_restore.pl tools found
in /usr/share/mythtv if possible, rather than manually using
mysqldump.  I think they were there in 12.04.  What is the MythTV
version?  If it is too old, the database upgrade code from that
version may not still be there in MythTV v30, and you may need to
upgrade to an older MythTV version first then upgrade to v30.  That
can be done in a virtual machine, then just backup the database and
restore it to the new real machine.

You could also try upgrading in place through the Mythbuntu LTS
versions: 12.04 to 14.04 LTS to 16.04 LTS.  Then upgrade to Xubuntu
18.04 LTS.  That is what I have done over the years.  Make sure to
read the release notes for each MythTV version on the way through the
upgrades, as there are sometimes some manual things you need to fix on
the way, such as setting up the MySQL timezone tables.  If you want to
try this, I would recommend doing an image backup of your current
system first, using a tool like Clonezilla.  Then if anything goes
wrong, you just do a Clonezilla restore and try again.

How much RAM does the PC have?  Later versions of Ubuntu need more
RAM, so you do need at least 4 Gibytes to run MythTV comfortably now,
and if you have a larger database, I would recommend 8 Gibytes.