Upgrade from 3.4 to 4.1Forum: User Feedback Topic: Upgrade from 3.4 to 4.1 started by: Glacial Posted by Glacial on April 02 2008,17:18
Argh! My upgrade from 3.4 to 4.1 has been most frustrating. If you plug in your USB drive and boot the 4.1 CD you end up at a blank screen with no icons at all!In the end I had to go to an Ubunto machine and get the sylphid and firefox dir out of the backup tar and copy them to a new USB drive and start over. I've now got my setting for both of those programs and the icons now show up on the desktop. With a totally blank desktop 4.1 is a pain to try and use. I really really miss the control box that used to live in the lower right corner for mounting my USB and HDisk partitions. It was both a control and a visual feed back as to what was active. some kind of visual mount status would be nice. I could not figure out how to fix the clock to show the date; so ended up switching the WM just to get the date display back. So far, I just don't like it. Ver 3.4 was much nicer to use. So far I don't see anything added that's better. It's just more frustration to do things now. Sorry, Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on April 02 2008,17:39
It could've been helpful to look at what's different (default wm, drag and drop style via dfm, mounting, how to use things, etc) and how to do upgrade (ie release notes, norestore, etc).If you still plan on trying it out, you could do so and re-evaluate. Posted by roberts on April 02 2008,18:04
They are different operating systems, kernel, modules, wm, icons, filemgr. Just copying over a file to two, or restoring a backup from a different operating system one would expect problems.Read the original posts. Do a backup of only your personal files to be used on the new system. If you have not updated your extensions in a long time, you may need to re-download to get updated ones with icons for 4.x. You can always choose to stay with 3.x. Posted by Glacial on April 02 2008,18:16
I guess I'm stupid as I don't know where all this stuff is I'm supoosed to have consulted. My 4.1 is still not working right. I've got no tray icons and people keep talking about them on the board here. I can see them only if I jerk the usb and reboot. I would really like to see some ugrade howto info. What I ended up doing did not seem to work quite right. Posted by Glacial on April 02 2008,18:26
All my personal data is on my USB drive.The system auto backs up when I shutdown. I don't use hard drives. With a 1 gig USB I really don't need a HD. All my data fits in the palm of my hand. DSL appeals to me as I can move from hardware to hardware and keep my OS a constanst and still have full access to my data. I move around. Many computer boxes, one OS. It beats lugging a laptop around. Laptops are like black holes; they seem to grow and gain mass with time. Your upgrade info may not apply to me. Posted by Juanito on April 03 2008,03:41
At the boot splash type "base norestore" (or maybe "dsl base norestore").This will take you to the bare-bones dsl-4.x without loading any mydsl extensions and without restoring anything in your backup. You should then be able to see what dsl-4.x looks like and decide if you prefer it to dsl-3.x Posted by roberts on April 03 2008,17:36
It is dsl base norestoreYou can then selectively copy your personal data from the old backup.tar.gz. Using emelfm first rename your backup.tar.gz so that it does not get overwritten. Then double click on this renamed file. Emelfm will unpack its contents to /tmp/.emelfm-unpack/ directory. Continue with emelfm to navigate and selectively copy files to their respective locations on the new system. Posted by Glacial on April 03 2008,23:05
GreetingsI did the DSL norestore boot and the opened the backup.tar.gz and copied .mozilla, .sylpheed, and mail folders. Then rebooted. It seems to all be working now! I've got my email, filters and bookmarks etc. Also all the icons are there on the desktop and seem to be working right. Thanks Posted by windancer on Aug. 18 2008,21:03
I couldn't agree more. I would install stuff from my dsl just have it disappear from the dsl menu upon reboot. that wasn't just uci apps its all apps. Then I couldn't get a resonable explanation as to how to add stuff to the menu so I gave up and went back to 3.4. So I think I will hang with 3.4 till another new version comes out. Posted by tetonca on Nov. 11 2008,15:40
I dunno, but mine was a pleasant upgrade from DSL 3.3 to DSL 4.4.8.I remembered I've managed to upgrade without using a CDROM drive in the past: # mount -t iso9660 /mnt/sda3/dsl-4.4.8.iso /mnt/test -o loop After I acquired the .iso and copied it to the thumb drive, I did the above to mount it. Was able to grab KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX that way, along with the kernel and mini-root filesystem, and put them where they belong. I pointed the grub record to the kernel and mini-root. The desktop came up without the fluxbox style 'envane' that I had been using; was no problem finding envane's two required files and restoring it to my local user directory. I could have made it available globally and may do so later. My backup came up way short; it was obvious that ~/.filetool.lst in /home/dsl wasn't being seen, so I took a look around and soon discovered there was an expected (and, I think, new) location for this file, in /opt -- and that there was a second similarly-named file there, /opt/.xfiletool.lst. One of the great ones here mentioned this file is an exclude list, for things like the Cache for mozilla. Since I always run my backups with: $ mkdir ~/log-tmp.d $ cd ~/log-tmp.d $ script $ su - dsl $ sudo filetool.sh backup I had no issues detecting something new was going on. I of course mounted /mnt/sda2 to copy the backup.tar.gz to a safe location (I keep a dozen or so revisions of this file on hand, all named YYMMddhh-backup.tar.gz). I looked in /etc/skel and found lots of goodies there; made a local copy (let's say to ~/.hidden/skel) and poked around to see what was new. At some point I read the Changelog on the main DSL web page, and saw what sorts of things I'd be looking for. But that was after I'd loaded Mozilla or Firefox and got 'bon echo' .. instead. Then I went to Mozilla web to see wtf bon echo was about. Satisfied. Meanwhile most of what I had worked as always. So for me it was the matter of installing the Envane style so fluxbox could use it, copying /home/dsl/.filetool.lst to /opt, updating grub (vim /boot/grub/menu.lst) and exploring how the new .xinitrc in /etc/skel invokes new features. Last night was spent migrating from ~/.xtdesktop to ~/.dfmdesk, which was fun and actually addresses some of my recent wishes to do a bit more with xtdesktop than I had found it capable of doing. dfm good. lynx, vim and iptables all loaded correctly; I haven't checked extensions I don't use often. I noticed the startup scripts want write-access to mydsl directory, so I changed the ownership there to dsl:staff and that made the bad error messages go away (shortcuts.lua line 76). I generally don't have any hard mounts by the time I login (/dev/sda2 gets umount'ed somehow, the way I was doing things, so I added a few lines in /opt/bootlocal.sh to make that happen at the right time). I want it so I can cycle power with nothing mounted. $ cat /proc/cmdline quiet root=/dev/sda1 ro vga=792 nopcmcia noacpi nodma noscsi fromhd=/dev/sda1 toram frugal restore=sda2 mydsl=sda2/mydsl/active host=tetoncahost tz=USA/Eastern I played with checkfs boot option; it nicely checks filesystems just as I'd do it and then reboots (that was a surprise, but not hardly). I've backed up and restored several times. Firewall works. No smoke coming out of the computer and I don't notice anything scary. I call that a good upgrade. --- thank you -- Posted by buzzard on Sep. 04 2009,21:22
Not that I have any knowledge to help you there, but when you say a blank screen, was it completely black, no light at all? |