Hey there folks,
First post here on the new consolidated board. I’m impressed with the overall look and feel. Great job!
I have a question. After several years of hanging out with the Debian distros, I came back over to try SUSE again. The last time I had used SUSE was back at version 9.3, so it had been a while. Anyway, 10.3 suggested that I partion my hard drive with my /home directory on it’s on partition…so I did that during install. Now that 11.0 has been out, I want to upgrade via a clean install, but I’d like to keep the data that is on the /home partition as it is, if that’s possible. This is the first time I’ve actually separated things like this on separate partitions and I’m not sure how the upgrade process would go in this situation. Will I need to back up the current /home directory and just let the installer reformat the disk and repartition, afterwards, restoring the files from the backed-up /home to the new or what?
Yes, you should always backup. … Anyone can make a mistake, or something unexpected (power outage) or something at the most inopportune time can happen.
Reference the /home, when you run the openSUSE-11.0 installer, it might pickup your 10.3 and offer to install 11.0 on top. To be certain you recognize what is happening, on your 10.3 before installing 11.0, you can type (and keep a printed copy) of:
df -h
su -c ‘fdisk -l’
so it should be clear to you which partition is your /home.
There is a good possibility openSUSE installer will propose to reformat your /home. So you must go into the advanced/expert settings, basing your edits on the openSUSE installer proposal, and tell the installer NOT to reformat the /home, but rather keep it, and to mount it as /home
The rest is pretty straight forward.
Note when updating I always keep an electronic backup and paper copy of my /etc/X11/xorg.conf, /etc/fstab, /etc/cups directory (electronic only), /etc/modprobe.d/sound file, /boot/grub/menu.lst, bookmarks.html (just in case), email addresses (electronic only), etc …