OpenSUSE 10.3 > 11.0

[NEO-BAHAMUT-]

How do we go about installing this if we have 10.3 already. I take it that it updates your system without formatting any hard drives. Please could someone do us a tutorial on this and what will happen etc. This will definately come in handy for people like myself who have never updated from a lower version of linux to a higer version.

Also is it a better idea to actually install 11.0 from fresh ? Ie formatting the hard drive and then going through the usuall installation.

thanks

NEO-BAHAMUT-

[Chrysantine]

I think you'll find as many opinions as there are people about how you should go around this - I've personally taken the guideline that if the system I'm updating is older than 2 versions I've done a fresh installation on the machine (For example 10.0 to 10.3).

If you have a seperate /home partition, upgrading is naturally easier as you can wipe out the existing installation and retain your settings.

Even though you can do a "upgrade on the fly" with zypper I would encourage acquiring the installation media and doing the update offline - as in rebooting with the CD/DVD in the drive, this gives the added benefit of not tampering files that are in use and causing system instability.

[swerdna]

I too would encourage the fresh install because two factors come to mind: newer KDE software but more importantly I've heard the package manager is greatly revamped so it might not be smooth to just update.

Anyone else heard that the package manager has been made "quick"?

Look, I gotta say it: I'd never update Suse. I always have /home separate partition. I back that up because I'm paranoid - too much work there. Then I make a separate partition for the new root and install there, mounting the old home as the /home partition in the new distro.

[rs3york]

You cannot do a straight upgrade via zypper from 10.3 to 11.0.

oS11 uses lzma compression for its rpms and the package management of oS10.3 is not compiled to handle lzma.

The simplest method would be to do a clean install. You don't have to pre-format because the installer can do the formatting for you.

If you want to be a brave soul, you can follow the instructions here
Upgrading 10.3 to 11.0 (Factory) « Captain Magnus’ Weblog

Still, the simplest method would be to back up your personal files (which is a good idea all the time) and do a clean install. Then you can restore your personal files afterwards.

[thestig]

i'm going to go along with a few others here and say do a fresh install. but luckily by default 10.3 creates seperate partition for /home. so what you should do is, only format the old root partition, so it uses this as the new root partition, and your old /home will still be kept as long as you direct new user directory to here. or you could just back up /home, then format everything, then just put all your data back in /home.

really up to you.

[rs3york]

@ swerdna

Yes the package management is quick. I'd say it's beyond quick.
I came from the Debian "apt-get" world of package management into openSUSE 10.3 and was astonished how slow it was. The fact that long-time Suse users were praising 10.3 as an improvement over 10.1 & 10.2 made me cringe at how terribly slow those versions must have been.

But oS11.0 is as fast as, if not a step quicker than, the Debian apt system.

[Chrysantine]

Originally Posted by rs3york

You cannot do a straight upgrade via zypper from 10.3 to 11.0.

Well you can if you do some preparative work but as I said, it's not exactly bulletproof hence I tend to advocate the "offline install".

[ken_yap]

For most users I would recommend the new install version. If you had /home separate, then you can avoid a restore (but you should still do a backup, just in case).

Sometimes I have to use the upgrade option where there is only a short window of time to do the physical upgrade using the media, and then fix things up afterwards. But I do not recommend that home users do this, it can be quite frustrating when you have to reconcile config files, etc.

[ken_yap]

Dang, there really needs to be an edit my post option. On the other hand,the large font size makes it easy for my old eyes.

To elaborate, the sorts of reconciliation of config files are generally when rpm leave behind some .rpmnew files. The upgrade process is conservative, if you have modified a config file, it prefers to leave your version alone. So it leaves the distributed version in a .rpmnew files. The means that very seldom will an upgrade break a working service outright. However it means that you may miss new features or better ways of doing things that are provided in newer versions of software. So I always look for .rpmnew (and .rpmsave) files after an upgrade and do a diff with the current version to see what is new, (or what has been changed).

Squid config files generally gave me the most problems as they phased out some old ways of doing things.

It's worthwhile noting which files you are meant to edit for site customisations and which ones you should avoid changing. For example, you are meant to put site specific system cron jobs in /etc/cron.d, and you are supposed to modify /etc/dhcpd.conf.local. That way you can avoid more .rpmnew or .rpmsave files when you do an upgrade.

[NEO-BAHAMUT-]

So in for example my computer. I have a primary drive of 500gb and a secondary drive of 300gb. On my primary drive i usually have the operating system and which ever applications i want to install. On my secondary drive i have stuff such as pictures, music, videos, documents etc.

When i come to installing suse11 from a fresh do i get to decide if i want to keep my secondary drives files as i dont want to lose any of them. I have just installed 10.3 and it was a doddle as i formatted my c: partition through vista and then all i had to do was install straight to my primary drive opensuse where it sorted all the partitions out for me itself.

I hope i dont end up losing anything from this...

How many days is it now then till its out about 6-7 days? Im still very new to this all but moving from Microsoft to Linux is in my eyes the way forward for the world. Its opened my eyes so much this past few weeks. I think i love it.