Due to the arrival of the Blogging / Articles module, the HowTo has been move to here: HowTo upgrade openSUSE 11.4 to Tumbleweed
Very useful zwerdna!!! Thank you.
Now I check it.
PS guys I wrote that pretty quickly, tell me what I should change OK?
Maybe a bit more emphasize on (the links to) what Tumbleweed is, is not and that it is not for real beginners. There are some threads on the forums that give a strong impression that people want to use it because they like the word Tumbleweed ;(. We can (and in the end are not willing of course) to stop them, but pointing to the information they should read first may have more stress then it has now. (my personal opinion).
Hi,
And won’t it also be necessary to zypper dup --from Tumbleweed_All_of_Packman to switch vendor for the Packman packages?
Regards,
Neil Darlow
Warning: Tumbleweed is not recommended for new users: It’s a new concept, a distro that is perpetually upgraded, and it’s not been going for long, so there will be problems that new users simply can’t cope with. Understand this: Tumbleweed is not stable. I will not be a bit surprised if I have to reinstall Tumbleweed when some bug causes a key problem, or a dependency issue or other incompatibility arises. If that could make you stressed, don’t install Tumbleweed.
Perfect! At least we can point to this when people start complaining, (but I hope they read it before starting to use it).
It works. It works. It works.
Sorry I am very happy with that. 
Thank you again swerdna.
question(s) regarding repositories going forward
Once Tumbleweed is up and running what happens when new releases of openSuse appear or 11.4 is decommissioned? As one can’t use 11.4 repos forever will there eventually be Tumbleweed oss, non-oss and contrib repos? Same for KDE/Gnome newer versions and various 3rd party obs repos? I assume for now just use the 11.4 versions of those obs repos.
I myself used both with this: “zypper dup --from Tumbleweed --from Tumbleweed_All_of_Packman” but I used the -D option first to see if it would complain, and it didn’t. And I made a backup image of root partition first. However I’m not at all sure of this dual --from option, being a newbie at “zypper dup” myself. I didn’t want to advertise that command up front in the howto because I would need to explain the options “–repo” and “–from” and it all looked like being a bit too wordy.
Anyone have thoughts on that?
Well, come November, we’ll have openSUSE 12.1 as a basis for starting Tumbleweed. Those who are already based on 11.4 can keep right on tumbling I suppose, and it even will be possible in theory to start from either 11.4 or 12.1. But the expiry of 11.4 is a long ways off, don’t stress about that right now. After all this is a very new process, only just getting into testing.
And for a user who is experienced enough to use Tumbleweed, reinstalling openSUSE is no sweat. So I say, wait and see how the devs have organised it all in 12 months or so.
Regarding zypper dup, I ended up with a mix of 2.6.37xx and 2.6.38xx kernel packages and had to sort all the mix out using yast.
All is well now though 
On 04/06/2011 11:06 PM, swerdna wrote:
>
> But the expiry of 11.4 is a long ways off, 3 years (?)
typo maybe? its about one year and five months to EOL
openSUSE 11.4 - September 15th 2012 which is in 527 days (2 months after
release of 11.6)
cite: Lifetime - openSUSE Wiki
–
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD [NNTP via openSUSE 11.3 + KDE4.5.5 +
Thunderbird3.1.8] Can you believe it? This guy Ralph wins $181 million
in the lottery last Wednesday, and then finds the love of his life just
2 days later. Talk about LUCK!
typo maybe? its about one year and five months to EOL
Thanks DD, don’t know what I was thinking.
These ultra short lifetimes seem to me to waste energy and resources. I think it would be better to have a longer cycle to allow more focus on quality. Maybe Tumbleweed will survive and be the long-term distro, that would be good. (Just my 2c worth).
On 04/07/2011 10:36 PM, swerdna wrote:
>
> I think it would be better to have a longer cycle to allow more
> focus on quality.
>
agree…i’m a strong proponent of quality trumping speed or glitz!
but, somewhere it seems that the someone(s) in the driver’s seat have
decided the best way ahead for openSUSE is to capture the hearts and
minds of those who want tomorrow’s stable software yesterday, no matter
how undependable–if you can get excited by watching the desktop shimmer
and shake…
–
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD [NNTP via openSUSE 11.3 + KDE4.5.5 +
Thunderbird3.1.8] Can you believe it? This guy Ralph wins $181 million
in the lottery last Wednesday, and then finds the love of his life just
2 days later. Talk about LUCK!
Hi,
I think it is more a case of being seen to be competitive with other leading distributions. If openSUSE really got behind Tumbleweed I think it would quickly shoot up the distribution rankings (how long before an openSUSE marketeer picks-up on that?).
Regards,
Neil Darlow
Hmm, my 100th post. I guess I do have something to say
Why do you add the same repo twice? I guess you wanted to type the correct URL for “openSUSE Tumbleweed” and not Packman’s.
I wanted to try it yesterday, but zypper complained right at the start of the upgrade that nothing provides the kernel module for Virtualbox… since I need Virtualbox I just aborted and changed the repos back to the original 11.4 ones.
On 04/08/2011 03:06 PM, neildarlow wrote:
>
> I think it is more a case of being seen to be competitive with other
> leading distributions.
since we have no “bottom line” or “market share” i’d rather see us being
seen to be more competitive with the other stable, usable, reliable and
predictable distributions…
today (according to the completely unreliable to show much of anything
but hits, DistroWatch) we are number 5 behind stable Debian (at 4) and
ahead of stable CentOS at 11, stable Slackware at 13, stable FreeBSD at
15, stable Gentoo at 18 and stable Red Hat at 20…
so, we should be happy that we are way up there, but buggy? nah!
–
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD [NNTP via openSUSE 11.3 + KDE4.5.5 +
Thunderbird3.1.8] Can you believe it? This guy Ralph wins $181 million
in the lottery last Wednesday, and then finds the love of his life just
2 days later. Talk about LUCK!
That’s my error, really bad typo in the Tumbleweed repo address, thanks for telling me. The address is fixed now. can you let me know if it works with the new address, just for confirmation?
I can only assume that neildarlow meant to be more competitive with the few rolling release distros in the market. If you want a really good rolling release you either need to go through a lot of text or go with a rather small distro.
I’ve been tempted to use Arch, but I just can’t be arsed to go through all those text files. And I don’t want to risk picking a small distro to maybe see it get abandoned next year.
I really prefer a rolling distro as I’m getting pretty tired of having to upgrade so often. I just want to install and get new updates, when they are deemed stable by the devs.
On 04/10/2011 08:06 AM, dokterw wrote:
>
> And I don’t want to risk picking a small distro to
> maybe see it get abandoned next year.
hmmmmm…Arch has been around (almost) ten of Linux’s twenty years…
>
> I just want to install and get new updates, when
> they are deemed stable by the devs.
have you found Tumbleweed to be stable, so far?
since it is based on 11.4 with over 1200 bugs (today, with 370+ being
critical or major), i can’t imagine it could be considered “stable” by
the devs…
note: i have no idea how any of the other rolling releases compare in
terms of stability…(i am, on the other hand rather confident that
openSUSE has the others beat in terms of nearness to tomorrow’s glitz…)
–
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
[NNTP via openSUSE 11.3 + KDE4.5.5 + Thunderbird3.1.8]
Maybe the developers are not here because they are so busy fixing these>
http://tinyurl.com/392jnb