It’s time to bite the bullet before I run out of security update support in December. I also have a sda that is starting to show signs of possibly failing soon when I run smartctl -H. What I want to do is mirror my existing sda with pmagic and upgrade to 11.3.
How much trouble will I have going the upgrade route over doing a clean install and trying to import all my Thunderbird/firefox etc data to it with 11.3 and KDE 4.X?
The basic problem with upgrades is that some left over applications and or data can cause very odd issues not present in a clean install and for which no one else may even have a clue to tell you what to do to fix it. One thing is for sure, you need to get that new hard drive coming AND I would do a manual copy of all of my important files to somewhere else. I would copy all of my music & video files, all of my personnel mail, backup your bookmarks in Firefox AND i would write down manually anything that I had trouble coming up with in my last openSUSE installation that I did fix. I would spend a WHOLE NIGHT preparing for the change to openSUSE 11.3 and leave no stone unturned.
Now, as for the upgrade consider that once you have backed up MANUALLY, all important data, you only have time to waste in trying an openSUSE update over a clean install. I will say that once you spend a couple of nights ALMOST getting everything working right but coming down to a few odd issues, you will wish you had went the clean install route. However, upgrades are VERY possible and could work OK for you. In the end however, I would surely go the clean install route after taking plenty of time to back up everything that matters to a different drive somewhere else.
Thank You,
Thanks for the reply. I really am thinking of doing a full install as this is a major change in KDE going from 3.5 to the current 4.? I’ll just change my UID to match my old one and drag in my config files for Mozilla/firefox/xchat and the like. I believe. I feel like I am giving up so much goodness that was in the now dead 3.5
I do a rsync -av /home/flamebait/ /backup/flamebait/ everyday to a separate drive every day. All most all my media is on drives that are not where /home is. I happen to have a new drive on hand. The message am getting from sdmartctl -h is.
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
Please note the following marginal Attributes:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 069 045 045 Old_age Always In_the_past 31 (Lifetime Min/Max 28/32)
It’s sitting right behind a fan and is cool to the touch.
You can keep /home and all your configuration files. The main problem will be if you use Kontact and need to migrate stuff. You have to import emails into separate folders and then move them over to the KDE4 folders and address books may or may not migrate. Sometimes this is a matter simply of moving the relevant files from .kde to .kde4; so take it step by step and only delete your KDE3 material when you are sure it is safely in KDE4. I haven’t lost anything in the migration but I have been puzzled as to why some things went over with no problem and others needed to be manually transferred.
Thanks I went for the install method and importing in my configurations and data method.