Article: HowTo Prepare 11.4-based Tumbleweed for openSUSE 12.1

If you have Tumbleweed based on openSUSE 11.4, it is underpinned by 11.4’s software repositories.

Changing from Tumbleweed based on openSUSE 11.4 to Tumbleweed based on openSUSE 12.1 requires only that you delete some opennSUSE 11.4 repositories and replace them with the contemporary repositories.

(You can do this now, even before the repositories for openSUSE 12.1 become available)

Here is the central suite of repositories for Tumbleweed based on openSUSE 11.4:

openSUSE 11.4_oss        http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.4/repo/oss/
openSUSE 11.4_non_oss    http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.4/repo/non-oss/
openSUSE 11.4_Updates    http://download.opensuse.org/update/11.4/
Tumbleweed               http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/openSUSE:/Tumbleweed/standard/
Packman_Tumbleweed       http://packman.inode.at/suse/openSUSE_Tumbleweed

You might have some others, but those above are the repos that are central to Tumbleweed.

To prepare for 12.1 (or to switch to 12.1) you simply change the first three in the above list from the “openSUSE” repos to the corresponding “current repos”, and achieve the list as follows:

openSUSE Current oss         http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/openSUSE-current/repo/oss/
openSUSE Current non_oss     http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/openSUSE-current/repo/non-oss/
openSUSE Current Updates     http://download.opensuse.org/update/openSUSE-current/
Tumbleweed                   http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/openSUSE:/Tumbleweed/standard/
Packman_Tumbleweed           http://packman.inode.at/suse/openSUSE_Tumbleweed

You can do this now, before 12.1 is released, or later. Why? Because the three addresses at the top of the second list are actually links to the correct contemporary addresses and the developers will make sure they point to the correct repos before and after the transition from 11.4 to 12.1

Priorities: I recommend you leave them at the defaults (equal across all repos) for the transition (and afterwards).

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Thank you for the guide.I expectantly await 12.1 and KDE 4.7 !!!

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Done mine, looking forward to the release date tomorrow.

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It depends on the priority. Why there is no single words about it?

Tumbleweed is designed and tested by the maintainer (Greg K-H) to have only equal priority across all repositories. You can have differing prioritoes if you know what you are doing, want to be more adventurous than the basic design criteria, but for average users like me, default priorities will (theoretically) cause least (dependency) problems. So, in a simple guide for average folk, to say anything about priorities would just cause confusion of the sort that you can see easily and often in the Forums.

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WARNING: watch out for newer glibc. Despite the version number differs only by minor number, it is not fully backward compatible. So on one hand updating it does not trigger update of all affected software (see above – minor change), on the other hand it breaks some (not all) already installed software.

This issue is reported. I hope it will be fixed, but until then I switched back to 11.4 repos.

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The openSUSE-current links appear to be useless…if you add them it looks for a dvd description file with 11.4 as the version in the oss dir when reviewing metadata. If you choose 12.1 it correctly pulls the 12.1 file that is actually IN the repo.

You make a mistake. The addresses are correct and work fine. For example, these two addresses (in Nov 2011) are identical, check them out:

openSUSE Current oss         http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/openSUSE-current/repo/oss/
openSUSE-12.1-Oss            http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/12.1/repo/oss

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I wonder if it still is possible to upgrade 11.4/Gnome 2.32 to the latest packages and kernel versions provided by (previous) tumbleweed?

I just tried ‘zypper dup’ using the following five repositories enabled

openSUSE_11.4_Updates
openSUSE_11.4_non_oss
openSUSE_11.4_oss
Tumbleweed_standard
Packman_Tumbleweed

but ends up with the 11.4 kernel 2.6.37.6-0.9-desktop version

Sadly, the short answer to your question is “no”.

If you “zypper dup” with the repos you listed, then the last two on the list will be largely skipped because the packages are incompatible with the first three as of the release of 12.1

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Sadly, the 11.4 based tumbleweed repo is gone, it should have been kept for those of us who wish Gnome 2.x in a transition period. I myself use it in dualboot with 12.1. Another expectation that was mentioned in another thread, is to lock down Gnome 2 packages with YaST before upgrading to openSUSE Current (12.1) tumbleweed. I wonder if this will work when the Gnome 2.x packages are not compiled for the 12.1 base?

You could back up the root partition, lock Gnome 2, do the update. If it breaks, restore the root partition. here’s a howto: openSUSE Forums - HowTo Backup and Restore the Tumbleweed Root/System Partition Quickly & Simply (I’ve used it successfully to restore broken Tumbleweed a couple of times so far)