Cleanup after install

English Install/Boot/Login
1

I recently upgraded my laptop from 11.2 to 11.3

I used the “New Install” option but left /home “as-is”, same partition as 11.2 without a reformat during the upgrade.

Generally worked well, but strange things do happen from time to time.

Is there a recommended list of the “hidden” (e.g. .kde4) files from 11.2 that should be purged or modified in the /home user area?

2

Generally, reusing your /home partition is a good way to preserve your old settings such as bookmarks, mail, documents, downloads, pictures and such. Even program icons take off and start working again when the application is reloaded, if not part of the standard openSUSE version. Sometimes you might get in a case where a newer program was being used under the older version of openSUSE, depending say on what desktop version you had loaded. In such a case, you might have to find and remove that programs configuration file for things to go back to normal. The space wasted by old configurations is minimal compared to the time and data that can be saved when using an existing /home area. If you have an oddity, tell us about it and we can help figure out what it might be. I don’t know of a single place where unneeded files would be listed to look at.

Thank You,

3

Thanks for the feedback, In general I do find that leaving /home as-is makes the transition process smoother.
My update was to the “plain 11.3”, KDE4.4.4
A few items I have been chasing:

  1. I use Knetworkmanager. When running under 11.2, I was able to make it automatically startup on login. It would also start kwallet, which stores my WiFi passcodes. I don’t remember what I did under 11.2, but can’t achieve same under 11.3. This is a nuisance, not critical, as it is straightforward to start it manually.
  2. When running Dolphin with root privileges, a.k.a. FileManager SU, the Find File feature under Tools menu seems to crash or is being blocked by permissions or something. Having just checked on another system still running 11.2, perhaps this is not unique to 11.3 - it does not work there either.
  3. I run the AMD/ATI fglrx driver. As expected, the upgrade removed the old driver and started up 11.3 with the radeon driver. I downloaded the latest ATI driver (ver 10.8) , installed and it is up and running just fine. I had amdcccle-su, the configuration program, in my desktop folder. After the update, the icon for amdccclesu was a question mark, since it did not exist. I deleted the item from the desktop folder. After loading fglrx 10.8, I dragged the (new) amdccclesu.desktop item onto my desktop (from /usr/share/applications). It runs fine, but the icon on the desktop is still the question mark. Stranger yet, if I open the Desktop folder from Dolphin, with icon view, the Icon is correct.

These may all be kde4.4.4 buglets, rather than upgrade anomolies.

4

For KnetworkManager to auto start, start YaST / Network Devices / Network Settings Global Options Tab / Network Setup Method and set the bullet for User Controlled With Network Manager to on. If this is already done, you get a warning before you get to the point to set the bullet. No warning, it was not set and you need to set it for NetworkManager to start automatically. You may need to log out and back to see the icon load for you.

As for KDE apps, I added the KDE repositories for 4.4 updated apps (beware of adding in those for 4.5 and stick with 4.4) and did an update which seemed to fix some KDE problems. I am not sure about the other issues you mention.

Thank You,

5

Thanks again for this useful dialog.

I am not sure what your comment:

As for KDE apps, I added the KDE repositories for 4.4 updated apps (beware of adding in those for 4.5 and stick with 4.4) and did an update which seemed to fix some KDE problems.
means, did you intend to attach a URL or something?

A couple updates
Item 1. I have seen others reporting a similar issue; I followed an observation by OldCPU and created a new user account on my 11.3 system. Logged in, KnetworkManager starts right up. It still does not with my original login. I have yet to compare the hidden setups for each login.

Item 3. Interesting observation. After sending my previous post, I noticed that there were more icons showing in the Dolphin view of the folder “Desktop” than there were in the GUI “Desktop older”. The two differences were old, dead links. When I removed them (using Dolphin), the amdccclesu icon displayed correctly. Very strange, indeed…

6

I usually do something like:
mkdir OLD
mv .??* OLD
cd OLD; ls -a
and then move back what I know I want (such as shell startup files, .ssh, .gnupg, .mozilla and a few others). That’s assuming that I don’t mind abandoning my old settings and having to recreate them.