After some iterations of updating the system with zypper dup or yast and some years of service with the system you will find out that there is a lot of dust which is obsolete or has been forgotten. Recently I had the problem that I need to move my 32bit system to a 64bit system and thus the way to go was to migrate the running system into an image description, build a 64bit image from it and install that on the 64bit machine. But the most important part was to cleanup the running system and find out what it really contains. The report kiwi migrate created here was helpful and so I think it might be helpful for others too. Just call:

kiwi –migrate mySystem

It will end up with some data below /tmp/mySystem which of course can be removed at any time without any risk. Most interesting is the html report generated which you can view with any browser. So far kiwi collects the following information:

kernel version and kernel specific kmp packages

hardware dependent packages

installed gem packages

repository checkouts

rpm packages installed multiple times

rpm packages which could not be found according to the current repo setup including version and repo information

tree of modified files, packaged but changed

tree of custom files, those which doesn’t belong to any package or other part of the bullet list

basically the use case of kiwi migrate is to migrate the running system into an appliance description but I’m not there yet. There is still room for improvement but I think it still can help to cleanup the system and to see what is installed on the system and not managed by a package manager

I have tested this since openSUSE 11.4

Remember to have fun 🙂

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