[Solved] Upgrading to Tiny Core 3.0

[thane]

It may be a little early to ask, but:

I'm running TC 2.11.6 from a usb stick.

Is/will it be possible to upgrade to TC 3.0 from 2.11 with usbinstall, or only (or preferably) by installing from scratch?

If it's necessary/preferable to install from scratch, is the 2.11 mydata.tgz [sp?] file compatible with 3.0?

I've got a fair number of browser favorites, passwords etc. saved that I'd like to preserve if I can.

Thanks.

[maro]

I guess the question of whether your appliaction preferences and settings will work with the application version provided via the TC 3.x extensions is not really directly depending on the kernel. I trust that you are aware about what changes in the Core when you upgrade: i.e. the version of the kernel and the system libraries.

As a consequence most extensions have by now been rebuild, but there are a few for which this still has to be done. You should therefore re-download all your extensions again from the 3.x repository.

In some cases the 3.x repository might now have a more recent version of an application than the 2.x one. So you will have to check (e.g. via the .info files) to which degree that might apply to your set of extensions. I would expect that if an application is the same in both repositories the preferences and settings (as restored via your 'mydata.tgz' file) should work without a problem after the upgrade. I also expect that quite a few applications will be able to utilize the settings from an earlier version. In particular I'd expect browsers to be able to cope. But as always YMMV ...

I'm not aware of any particular tool to specifically support the upgrade from 2.x to 3.x. What I would do in your situation is to make sure to keep a copy of all things TC 2.x (i.e. the kernel, the initrd, your 'tce' directory and your 'mydata.tgz'). You could then either build the 3.x "infrastructure" in parallel (and have two stanzas in your boot loader configuration for 2.x as well as 3.x) or replace the 2.x versions of the kernel (i.e. 'bzImage'), the initrd (i.e. 'tinycore.gz') and extensions (as far as available) with the 3.x versions. Just use a copy of your 2.x 'mydata.tgz' in the 3.x setup and see how far it will work for you.

[thane]

Went ahead and installed TC 3.0 on a separate USB stick, downloaded a set of extensions from the 3.0 repository, and re-entered my passwords, browser settings and favorites. Whole thing took an hour or two since I'm running a very small setup. A couple of questions/quibbles that I'll address elsewhere. Thanks.