In-Place upgrade possible?

English Hardware
#1

Hi all… I currently am running 11.0, 32 bit on a Sempron 2800. Tomorrow the UPS man is bringing me a lovely Athlon II x4 chip with motherboard and RAM.

I was wondering if there was a relatively quick and easy way to upgrade to the 64-bit architecture that my new system would be capable of. I would prefer to do it in-place if possible, as I have installed many packages and have forgotten many of them. Also, I have compiled a few from source and they wouldn’t show up even if I could get a list of packages installed from YAST (with functional names, not just the name of the RPMs.)

I did an in-place upgrade (reluctantly) from 10.3 to 11.0 recently and it didn’t screw too much up, although I did lose a few now-unsupported programs. (ie XMMS)

If it matters, I use the KDE 3.5 desktop, and would like to stay with that.

#2

  1. There’s no way to switch a 32bit system to a 64bitter without reinstalling the system from scratch. Yet you can keep your /home-partition with your user-specific configurations.

  2. Huge version-jumps are generally quite tricky and I wouldn’t even recommend trying. You might have been lucky jumping from 10.3 to 11.0, but I don’t think it will work again, even more when changing to a 64bit system (this will actually not work at all, no chance). By the way: a hot upgrade will always kick out any app that would be provided by third party repositories in case the official repositories (in this case: the install-medium) can’t provide a substance for it. xmms is still provided by Packman.

  3. KDE3 on SuSE is still possible and, as far as I have heard, it works okay, but you should read the respective comments of openSUSEs KDE-team →here. If you install KDE3, I would recommend installing KDE4 or some other alternative desktop environment parallel to it, for KDE3 is really dead and rotting. I doubt KDE3 will still be available with SuSE 11.3.

Also, I have compiled a few from source and they wouldn’t show up even if I could get a list of packages installed from YAST (with functional names, not just the name of the RPMs.)

That’s the disadvantage of installing via ‘make install’. You should learn how to create installable .rpms after the compilation of a source. Remember: make love, not install.

#3

OK, then I guess I’ll have to bite the bullet and do a re-install. Does anyone know of a way to see an intelligent listing of what I have installed?

By that I mean what it actually IS. I know I can use the RPM command to see what packages are installed, but I want to know the NAME of what it gave me, and a summary if possible (similar to the display in YAST when I installed it, or even Zypper.)

Also, I have heard that if I didn’t have the time right away I could simply run my existing install as 32-bit even though I am now capable of 64. Granted I will lose a LOT of performance benefits by doing this, but it would mean my system will be usable in the meantime before I do the reinstall. Is this true? It would just “ignore” the enhanced capabilities?

Thanks for the quick response. And I think I will look up the procedure on how to create the RPMs, it will make things easier later on.

#4

By that I mean what it actually IS. I know I can use the RPM command to see what packages are installed, but I want to know the NAME of what it gave me, and a summary if possible (similar to the display in YAST when I installed it, or even Zypper.)

That sounds like you simply want the name without the version number, am I correct by assuming this? If so:

rpm -qa --queryformat '%{name}
' | grep -v gpg-pubkey | tr '
' ' ' > list.txt

I don’t find a solution for fetching summaries and the like though (and you should think about how useful a list containing summaries of about 1000 or 1500 packages would be…).

YaST offers an option to export a list, too, but this list is written in a format so it can be replayed after an initial install (also on the same version) which is not exactly “human readable”. Plus I’m not sure the YaST-version as used in openSUSE11.0 can do so at all.

…yet you can not use the whole list, since some packages are named differently or have different dependencies on different SuSE-versions, so basically it wouldn’t be of much use.

Also, I have heard that if I didn’t have the time right away I could simply run my existing install as 32-bit even though I am now capable of 64.

True.

Granted I will lose a LOT of performance benefits by doing this …]

Not true. De facto applications need to be written for 64bit to benefit from performance enhancements, while most packages today are simply made compatible with 64bit systems. There would be only very few occasions (if any at all) where you’ll experience a better performance.

#5

That command looks like it would work. I was looking for something plain-English that would tell me what packages I need to reinstall after the OS install has completed and from looking at the list that generated it would work. You are right that summaries for everything can be overkill.

How much advantage is there in updating my core OS to take advantage of 64-bit given that most packages don’t take advantage of the added processing power?

#6

You can’t just update the kernel, you would also have to update the runtime libraries, and when you’ve done that, you have installed perhaps 70% of what you would with a fresh install, and still be prone to things going pear-shaped.

#7

If I upgrade it would be with a fresh install now, since it isn’t possible to do it otherwise (at least not reliably).

My new question is how much of an advantage would upgrading be over just continuing to run what I have (and NOT take full advantage of the 64-bit proc)? Meaning that I’m running 32-bit everything on the new 64-bit chip. I believe I’d still get the boost from having a quad-core as opposed to single-core, and definitely the additional 1 Ghz of processing power on each one. (currently running 1.6 Ghz, my new toy is 2.6 Ghz).

I should have phrased it differently, When I said “core OS” I didn’t mean JUST the kernel, but the other packages/libraries required for a basic system… everything needed to make it work.

Pear-shaped is not a good thing in an OS, and I’d prefer to avoid that… so when I do upgrade it will have to be fresh, possibly with 11.1 (so I can EASE into KDE 4 instead of having to jump right in or do extra installs to keep KDE 3.5 for now)

#8

You will have the same KDE3 with 11.1 as with 11.2 (and it’s always possible to install KDE3 parallel to KDE4), so I recommend a fresh install of the 11.2. - actually, I’m getting a bit confused here… :slight_smile:

You can install the 64bit-version, of course. I only said that it would hardly be a faster system, the kernel installed with the 32-bit SuSE 11.2 is even capable of managing more than 4GB of RAM (up to 64GB). So whatever - just go ahead and install. I wouldn’t recommend staying with the 11.0, since it will only be supported until the end of June this year. But whether it’ll be 32 or 64 bit, you will have to make a fresh reinstall anyway if you want to make sure to have a consistent system.

#9

There is no great gain with 64bit but there is some.
I use _64 with 11.2 and it flawless so far.

Personally I would recommend 11.2 over 11.1
Even with the kde4 learning curve - IMO it’s a Rolls Royce by comparison to 11.1

#10

Thanks for your help. I did re-install my system, keeping the home directory.

#11

I’ve read this thread but am still confused about how to recreate my software environment after an openSuSE version upgrade. I have a 64 bit machine, and plan to do a clean install of 11.2 into a separate partition (so I can roll back if necessary). There must be a well-known, always used solution to this, but: How can I create a list of the extra (application etc) packages I have installed (in addition to the standard/default openSuSE packages) and then after the upgrade to 11.2 USE THAT LIST TO REINSTALL AUTOMATICALLY ALL THOSE EXTRA PACKAGES and so recreate my software environment.

If there’s already a tutorial on this (and I certainly couldn’t find it), please point me to it. In the past I’ve found that the export/import route using YaST gives very odd results – YaST wants to delete dozens and dozens of packages including seriously important stuff like the NetworkManager.

(If the answer is that there is no way, you have to do it manually, I have a suggestion for a tool to be built before 11.3 is released.)

Thanks.

#12

There must be a well-known, always used solution to this …]

No, there isn’t, because as I wrote:

Maybe the output of

rpm -qa --last

will help you to remember which packages you have, but that would still mean having to browse though a list of 1000 or 2000 packages.

The code I posted here (not my idea btw) is extremely useful when you want to reinstall the same version. It would work like this:

## Create package-list
rpm -qa --queryformat '%{name}
' | grep -v gpg-pubkey | tr '
' ' ' > list.txt
## reinstall packages
zypper in $(cat list.txt)

I love these commands, they work really well and convenient, but that would not work out when having a systemwide upgrade.

#13

Thanks gropiuskalle. I tend to use YaST but often have to resort to zypper when things get difficult. I appreciate that package names (which incorporate version numbers etc) may have changed, but the product name (Seamonkey, Thunderbird, blender, etc) doesn’t often change. So your suggestion looks like an interesting solution. But I think I’ll try

zypper install --dry-run $(cat list.txt)

first :slight_smile: