Upgraded my old laptop after almost 5 years untouched

deemon · 28 January 2026 13:55

Just yesterday/today night upgraded my old laptop, that had stood in shelf for almost 5 years untouched (ran Linux 5.11, 1. March 2021 according to pacman.log) to this… tbh I expected more trouble – “only” had to:

edit pacman.conf
1.1. and disable signatures for the initial upgrade : SigLevel = Never
1.2. just in case and tbh permanently add kernel metas to IgnorePkg, so it never suggests and I never accidentally accept those.
IgnorePkg = linux-meta linux-headers-meta linux-lts-meta linux-lts-headers-meta
(before that I just in case tried to install only linux 6.18 and headers to test it out if it even works and it kinda did, but killed all network connections, so not a good kernel until the upgrade actually succeeded, probably because missing newer split firmwares and whatnot… so had to turn back to linux 5.11 for the upgrade process at least)
uninstall couple AUR stuff, like pi-hole-standalone, to not mess with network while upgrading. any strictly unnecessary dkms packages, like xpadneo-dkms-git “just in case”.
actually try to upgrade and see all the blockers sudo pacman -Syu to start dealing with them.
remove some more unnecessary and easy to remove blockers, like radiotray, …
remove some dependency-hell blockers alone without stuff that depended on it: sudo pacman -Rdd phonon-qt5
just in case installed the replacement here before big upgrade sudo pacman -S phonon-qt6
and then finally big upgrade while blocking dependency version checks sudo pacman -Syud
… and it worked! (booted up even with linux 6.18 and network/wifi was present, so I called it success). … after I had selected from bios boot menu “manjaro”, because fallback was again out of sync and ended up in unusable grub prompt… because apparently CMOS battery had also died and forgot the default boot order.

as a cleanup and fixup process after that had to:

remove a lot of (mostly qt5) orphans. pacman -Qtdq | sudo pacman -Rns - .. couple of times.
install couple of newer LTS kernels for backup and remove all the 4.* and most 5.* kernels.
delete couple of plasma5 broken widgets;
fix grub to show graphical menu again because something (grub2?) decided that BIOS systems don’t need it anymore by default? (had completely black screen there, but luckily after timeout just booted up), by either:
a. uncomment GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT=console to get at least the text version and to see the menu actually exists there
b. comment the previous line out again and add vbe vga to GRUB_PRELOAD_MODULES to get the actual graphical grub menu back.
(after unsuccessful googling and duck-duck-go’ing for an hour, … Gemini helped, so thanks Gemini for the entire grub fix!)
replace pulse with pipewire (because pulse had started to give too many weird errors) sudo pacman -S manjaro-pipewire (had to remove couple of blockers beforehand, like pulseaudio-bluetooth and pulseaudio-ctl)
fix fallback bootloader sudo grub-install --removable … and patch /usr/bin/install-grub and add it to IgnorePkg.
restore signature check in pacman.conf
sudo DIFFPROG=meld pacdiff and work through all of them.
… and basically done.

(now need to order a replacement battery from ebay … since this one is DEAD… like 0% and not-charging. and CMOS battery!!)