I have recently had a couple of problems with updates messing things up (mostly my own fault due to repo issues).
These were fairly serious in that crucial parts of KDE segfaulted on login and also caused problems with the network.
This meant that I ended up reinstalling more than once.
Although it isn’t that hard to do, it does get a bit time consuming by the time you reconfigure everything how you want and install all the necessary codecs and applications.
Is there any way to get YaST to store the current state before updating so that if the update messes anything up you can easily revert to the previous state?
This would probably mean storing the previous versions of the files locally.
Thanks, but is there anyway to store the packages themselves as well?
Otherwise, reverting to the versions list will require you to be online to download them wont it?
I guess in the scenario I am thinking of, I wouldn’t have network access and/or the download size might be quite large.
Is this the right way to do it from the command line?
If you want to revert you disk drive to a previous state, there is cloning and imaging software for this task. Personally I didn’t find it to be worth the trouble of maintaining the backup images, as problems can nearly always be resolved in text mode or with a live CD.
I know what you mean.
Cloning and imaging is a bit far for me.
However, I am interested in the occasions where text mode and a live CD are still difficult to resolve.
I guess some way of doing something like the Windows “Restore Points” is what I am after.
Some way of keeping the existing crucial system files until I have check that after an update things aren’t messed up.
If YaST can’t backup the files it is going to update, maybe a crude way would be to just backup/compress the key directories and revert to them (and the list as mentioned above).
How would I best do that?
/etc contains most of the system config files. Backing this up as you back up your data would be useful. There may be others, but that’s the only one that comes to mind right now.
> I guess some way of doing something like the Windows “Restore Points”
> is what I am after.
No, AFAIK it only saves configuration changes, and you need to save also
program files.
I have seen this feature in a “serious” unix system. We did the updates,
tested the system for a day or two, then we could decide to consolidate the
changes or revert them. I think that the files were moved somewhere,
hardlinks changed… :-? I don’t know how they did it. Probably the new
files were stored into a common directory, and the old on another. Then
hardlinks were done to the new or the old version.
You can keep downloaded rpms, and then force install the older version. But
there is no application to do this automatically. We would have to record
somewhere every package that is installed in a session, and what it
replaces - then undo reinstalling the old one.
Hold on! I heard that the GTK version of YaST has this undo feature in
11.3. It is little known and tested, everybody saying the QT version is better.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
It is also possible to select one or the other only for the package
manager. For example, using gnome you might like the gtk interface with all
modules (consistent with the theming) but switch to the qt package module
because you prefer its features. It is the only module with different
features, AFAIK. Well, two modules, the maintenance and the updates one.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
