Cautions to take when migrating from an old openSUSE Linux to a new
For new Linux users, who are migrating from an older openSUSE, to openSUSE-11.1, here is some advice from the SuSE-10.2 reference manual, which is a useful reference for users who are updating (or re-installing) their SuSE for the first time:
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5.1 Updating the System
5.1.1 Preparations
Before updating, copy the old configuration files to a separate medium, such as streamer, removable hard disk, USB stick, or ZIP drive, to secure the data. This primarily applies to files stored in /etc as well as some of the directories and files in /var and /opt. You may also want to write the user data in /home (the HOME directories) to backup medium. Back up this data as root. Only root has read permission for all local files.
Before starting your update, make note of the root partition. The command
df / lists the device name of the root permission. There is also
df -h.
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For example, I typically make copies of my /etc/fstab, /etc/X11/xorg.conf, /etc/cups, /etc/modprobe.d/sound, /boot/grub/menu.lst.
.
And I typically keep a copy of the output of:
df -Th
cat /etc/fstab
su -c 'fdisk -l' #enter root password when prompted