I am a very happy openSUSE general user. This is my current desktop system: (CPU): Intel(R) Core™ i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz; (RAM): 7.8 GiB; (GPU): GeForce GTX 560; (OS): Linux 3.7.10-1.40-desktop x86_64; (SYS): openSUSE 12.3 (x86_64) KDE: 4.10.5. It gets a lot of general use.
The system has been regularly upgraded (zypper dup) since 11.4 and I would now like to upgrade to openSUSE 13.1. However total boot and startup time relative to a fresh installation of openSUSE 13.1 on a separate partition on this machine, is getting a bit slow. So, I have a few general questions that I don’t want to bother the support forums with but I think may also be of interest to others.
How long to others persist with upgrades before doing a fresh install?
What techniques do others use to keep upgraded systems clean and efficient?
What issues (apart from backup) are likely to arise with a fresh install of openSUSE 13.1 retaining a current openSUSE 12.3 /home/user?
What tools are available to monitor boot and startup hogs?
You will probably get as many different responses to this question as there are members in this forum.
… as for me, I always do a fresh install, since it is such a breeze to install openSUSE and set it up, in my experiences with it. And I prefer clean, fresh starts.
… which, of course, means the next question does not apply, in my case:
What techniques do others use to keep upgraded systems clean and efficient?
What issues (apart from backup) are likely to arise with a fresh install of openSUSE 13.1 retaining a current openSUSE 12.3 /home/user?
Hmmm. I haven’t had any that I can recall…
What tools are available to monitor boot and startup hogs?
… others here can answer this one much better than I can.
Miuku wrote: Bootchart will map out what pieces of bootup take the longest. Hint; get an SSD
I can’t see how to use Bootchart, but I know there are processes running from past ‘trial’ software installations that I don’t need. I have since learned to install such things on a ‘sand-box’ system for evaluation. Hint noted.
robin_listas wrote: This system has been upgraded and migrated from 5.2 since about 1998. No issues. Offline upgrade method (Hint: look up who wrote it)
Thanks. That’s longevity. I read the referenced SBD with interest. Some good tips there.
On Wed, 27 Aug 2014 08:56:01 +0000, Tallowwood wrote:
> How long to others persist with upgrades before doing a fresh install?
Depends on how much customization I’ve done on the system and what
changes are in the upgraded system.
Usually 2-3, or I’ll try an upgrade, and if I’m not happy with it, I’ll
make sure my backups of /home are current, and I’ll do a fresh install.
> What techniques do others use to keep upgraded systems clean and
> efficient?
Fresh installs every few releases, sometimes because I’ve migrated to new
hardware. Just went through this with my old “main” desktop - fresh
install on the new desktop, migrate /home over, then see what I missed in
terms of crontabs, extra non-RPM software installed, and other
customizations. Then wipe the old system and repurpose it or retire it.
A thousand times yes! The new system I got has an SSD on it along with a
large SATA drive. Shrunk the Win 8.1 installation to half the SSD and
put openSUSE 13.1 on the other half, with /home on a part of the large SSD
(2/3 to Linux, 1/3 to Windows - some Steam stuff is Windows only, after
all - and thanks to the Humble Bundles, I have a fair number of Windows-
only Steam games now).
Boot times on the new system are amazing - 5 seconds tops to a fully-
running system. It takes longer to get through the Dell BIOS startup
than to boot the system.
I took the plunge and all is well on system upgraded sequentially from 11.4, with one minor problem: akonadi fails to start after 12.3 to 13.1 upgrade.
Solved with help from this post from opensuse-bugs.
… there is a workaround:
After creating a new account and configuring kmail, I did a diff against the
old ‘.local/share/akonadi/mysql.conf’:
40a41
Deprecated in MySQL >= 5.6.3
91c92
< table_cache=200
table_open_cache=200
Solution is changing the variable name in old ‘mysql.conf’
from ‘table_cache’ to ‘table_open_cache’ and starting akonadi:
akonadictl start
After that, akonadi starts normally with all previous resources correctly identified.
On 2014-10-07 09:46, Tallowwood wrote:
>
> I took the plunge and all is well on system upgraded sequentially from
> 11.4, with one minor problem: akonadi fails to start after 12.3 to 13.1
> upgrade.
