[mythtv-users] Upgrading to newer version -- one step forward, two steps...

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sat, 11 Apr 2015 14:22:29 -0500, you wrote:

>I'd really like to upgrade to the latest version of MythTV, so I'd
>appreciate any help I can get.
>
>It seems each time I find some time to try again to upgrade my "works
>just fine, but really old" mythbuntu 10.04 system I run into a
>different problem that stumps me.  I finally abandoned the hope of
>just building the new system on the same hardware and got some new
>hardware to build an independent instance of mythbuntu and then
>replace the old system (moving the disks containing the recordings
>from the old system to the new system and migrating the database
>data).
>
>I'm having a new problem just getting the database upgrading to work,
>something I didn't run into in the past, and I have run out of ideas
>on how to fix it.
>
>Because my working system is so old, I now have to do a two-stage
>migration to get current.  I tried just going straight to the
>mythbuntu 14.04 install, but it wouldn't have anything to do with
>upgrading the restored database to the current version, clearly saying
>it was too old.  I have no problem getting the 12.04.1 version
>installed and updated to 12.04.5.  When I try to upgrade the restored
>database, I run into a problem.  FWIW, I restore the database using:

Other people on this list that have had to do a two-stage upgrade seem
to have done it by installing the intermediate version to a virtual PC
and done the database upgrade there, then backed up the upgraded
database and transferred it to the real machine with the final OS
version and MythTV version installed.  That seems to be a much better
idea than having to deal with all the potential problems of an OS
upgrade from the intermediate version to the latest version as well as
the database upgrade.

The recommended way of upgrading a database is to run mythtv-setup, as
it provides popups to say what it is doing and you have more control.
You can also use tail -f /var/log/mythtv/mythtv-setup.log to see how
the database upgrade is progressing.  It can take quite a long time if
you have lots of recordings like I do - I think my last major upgrade
took around 15 minutes.

On one upgrade I also ran across a hang that happened with the
database for one of the plugins (mythmusic).  The plugin databases are
not upgraded by mythtv-setup, only the core tables.  The mythmusic
tables get upgraded by mythfrontend, but I found on one upgrade that I
had to uninstall the mythmusic plugin, restore the database, do the
core database upgrade with mythtv-setup, run mythbackend and then
mythfrontend to get other non-core database upgrades done, then
shutdown mythbackend and reinstall the mythmusic plugin.  Then running
mythfrontend did the mythmusic upgrade without hanging.