Upgrade Sanity Check : Linksys WRT1900ACS LEDE-17.01.4 to OpenWRT-18.06.1

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Hi,

Finally getting round to upgrading to the newer merged OpenWRT-18.06.1 from LEDE-17.01.4 r3560-79f57e422d and would be grateful for a quick sanity check as its been a while since I've done anything to the router/LEDE/OpenWRT

I've a Linksys WRT1900ACS and after reading the ReleaseNotes for 18.06.0 it mentions that...

An upgrade from OpenWrt 15.05 or LEDE 17.01 to OpenWrt 18.06 is supported with the help of the sysupgrade utility which will also attempt to preserve the configuration. A configuration backup is advised nonetheless when upgrading to OpenWrt 18.06.

Sounds pretty straight-forward that a config backup followed by flashing openwrt-18.06.1-mvebu-cortexa9-linksys-wrt1900acs-squashfs-sysupgrade.bin will do the trick but wanted to check as I recall reading a while back when 18.06 was announced that a fresh flash of squashfs was required, but this doesn't seem to be the case.

Also, is there any simple way to list all packages I've installed so I can start building a set of bash scripts to ease installation? I know there is opkg list-installed but that seems to spit out absolutely everything thats installed on the system by default and I'm looking to get a short script written to install the additional packages I want.

Something along the lines of...

#!/bin/ash
opkg update
opkg adblock openvpn ...
2

What does it matter? If you tell opkg to install an already installed package, it won't choke.

3

Allows me to know and keep track of exactly what I've installed (been a bit haphazard under the current LEDE-17.01.4 and want to keep on top of things more with this upgrade).

Also my parsimonious mind trying to keep things as minimal as they need to be.

Any confirmation or advice on the main upgrade? Am I good to go with using a sysupgrade going from LEDE-17.01.4 > OpenWRT-18.06.1?

Found a post here suggesting that on upgrading I should explicitly deselect the option to "Keep Settings" (hence the need for a backup first). I suspect the packages I've installed will need manually re-installing though (hence the question about identifying what I've currently got installed).

4

The installed packages can be found in /usr/lib/opkg/status. This is including the base packages. But the (read-only) list of base packages can be found in /rom/usr/lib/opkg/status. So by comparing this 2 files, you can filter out the added packages.

5

Brilliant, thanks for the pointer, simple to diffthose and get a list of packages to install (will look into minimising this as many are no doubt dependencies).