Cucumber Linux 1.1 Upgrade Guide

Is it Safe for me to Upgrade Without Fear of Breaking my System?

As outlined in our release policy, this minor release aims to be as undisruptive as possible and break as few things as possible. We have made Cucumber Linux 1.1 such that the vast majority of our users can upgrade to it without any issue, and without breaking any part of their systems.

That being said, there are a few situations in which upgrading to Cucumber Linux 1.1 could potentially break your system:

  1. You are using a PHP script/application that works only on PHP 5. If this is the case, see the note about PHP at the bottom of this document.
  2. You have installed custom Perl modules. If this is the case, these modules will break as a result the upgrade. They can be fixed by rebuilding your perl modules. If your modules were installed using CPAN, this can be done by running
    cpan upgrade
    as root after the upgrade.
  3. You have installed third party packages or built software from source that link against the Perl or PHP libraries. In this case, those packages will need to be rebuilt post upgrade.

If you do not fall into any of these categories, then you can upgrade to Cucumber Linux 1.1 worry free.

How to Upgrade your System Automagically

Upgrading a Live, Internet Connected System

The easiest way to upgrade an existing Cucumber Linux installation to Cucumber Linux 1.1 is to use our upgrade script. This script is available on our mirror at http://mirror.cucumberlinux.com/cucumber/cucumber-1.1/garden/upgrade_script/upgrade_to_cucumber_linux_1.1.sh. To upgrade a system with internet access using this script, simply run the following commands (as root):

curl -O http://mirror.cucumberlinux.com/cucumber/cucumber-1.1/garden/upgrade_script/upgrade_to_cucumber_linux_1.1.sh
curl -O http://mirror.cucumberlinux.com/cucumber/cucumber-1.1/garden/upgrade_script/upgrade_to_cucumber_linux_1.1.sh.asc
gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring /etc/pickle.d/keys/cucumber.gpg --verify upgrade_to_cucumber_linux_1.1.sh.asc || (echo Error verifying the signature. Upgrade failed && read && exit 1)
chmod 744 upgrade_to_cucumber_linux_1.1.sh
./upgrade_to_cucumber_linux_1.1.sh || (read && exit 1)
echo Upgrade complete.

Once those commands successfully finish running, reboot your system. You will then be running Cucumber Linux 1.1.

Upgrading Without Internet Access

If you need to upgrade a system that does not have internet access, this can be done using the Cucumber Linux 1.1 Full Edition Installation Medium (it won't work with the Basic Edition). Simply boot from the installer and select "Upgrade an existing Cucumber Linux installation" from the main menu.

It is important to note that upgrading this way requires your system to have at least 1GB of RAM. If you have less than 1GB of RAM, there is a chance the upgrade could fail and break your system in the process.

Upgrade Details

This section contains the list of major changes in Cucumber Linux 1.1.

Upraded Packages

The following packages have been upgraded in Cucumber Linux 1.1. It will be necessary to upgrade all of them to successfully upgrade to a fully functional Cucumber Linux 1.1 system.

Packages directly upgraded

Packages upgraded to satisfy dependencies for the directly upgraded packages

Note About PHP

PHP has been upgraded from version 5.6 to 7.2 in Cucumber Linux 1.1. Unfortunately, several applications that were designed for PHP 5 will not work with PHP 7. To address this problem, Cucumber Linux 1.1 supports both PHP 5.6 and 7.2. PHP 5 is provided by the 'php5' package, which can be found in the 'lang-extra' directory. PHP 7 is provided by the standard PHP package, 'php', which can be found in the 'lang-general' directory. Do not install both the php and php5 packages on the same system. They conflict with each other and installing both of them will result in a broken PHP installation. Use one or the other, and make sure to uninstall one before installing the other.

Unfortunately though (to complicate the matter further) PHP 5.6 is supported only until December 31, 2018, which is a year before the Cucumber Linux 1.1 End of Life. For this reason, WE CANNOT GUARANTEE THE SECURITY OF YOUR SYSTEM AFTER DECEMBER 31, 2018 IF YOU USE PHP 5.6.

You will have to make a choice as to which version of PHP you want to use during the upgrade process. Details about what has changed from PHP 5 to PHP 7 can be found at http://php.net/migration70. If you are unsure of which version to use, we recommend using PHP 7.2. If you run into problems with PHP 7.2, you can always downgrade to PHP 5.6 until your entire system is ready for the switch to PHP 7 (just make sure you upgrade before December 31, 2018).