I’m not technically savvy like most of the people here. (e.g. what is sysv?) From the threads, I gather that I can count on seeing some kind of major problem with upgrading since I’m still with 11.3 in duel boot with WinXP. Most of the problem threads that I’ve seen are upgrades from pure 11.4, so I figure I would definitely have to assume the crash position upon upgrading.
The way I see it, I have a nice classic car that’s a regular work horse, but I don’t think the starship OSS 12.1 can fit in my garage. I AM hoping to absolutely, positively rid myself of windoze using 12.1 because there maybe quantum leaping, space folding apps in 12.1 that will replace the apps I have in windoze.
Would I be better off starting from scratch with a fresh install of 12.1? Thanks in advance!
BTW: I saw the 12.1 upgrade DVD at on disk, I thought of investing $5 there rather than wait for the download.
At this point in time I would recommend you upgrade to 11.4 and wait on 12.1. In My Humble Opinion it is not ready yet. There were many mentions of that by others during the testing … suggesting to wait on the release -but- they did not. Personally, I have had some lockups and failures while logged on to this forum. In fact I am now in my 11.4 system cause the 12.1 system would not let me logon to leave a message!!
So I suggest you do a clean install, BUT if you have a separate /home, only mount it and do not format it. With an existing system like this I normally select custom partitioning. Now, when you upgrade, you use all of your old partitions, so with custom partitioning, don’t let openSUSE suggest a thing. Then, for your old root /, right click the partition, pick edit, elect to format it and select the mount point of /. For the old /home, right click the partition, elect to edit, select the mount point of /home, but do not format it (the default). The old swap will already mounted as swap. For any other partitions you want to mount, just right click, select the old mount point that you used, do not format and let it be mounted as before. In the installation section, make sure the correct boot hard drive is first since openSUSE can not guess a BIOS selected boot drive that is not the first based on hardware addressing. Before you start the install, if you have an ATI or nVIDIA video card, you may want to press F5 and select VESA. Once in openSUSE, edit the /boot/grub/menu.lst file as root (In KDE do a Alt-F2 and enter kdesu kwrite /etc/boot/grub/menu.lst) and add in the kernel load option **nomodeset **on the standard openSUSE startup line. The same command is already included with the failsafe entry except you don’t need all of the other extra stuff.
When you do a clean install but with your old /home partition intact and not formatted, you only need to reinstall all of your old software, just as you had before and your old settings will be maintained for you. Good luck…
If you go for 12.1, do a clean install. It may be worth going to 11.4 while waiting several months for 12.1 bugs to be resolved and receive updates. For 11.4, you also have the choice of a clean install or an upgrade.
If upgrade (zypper dup), you need to understand repos, grub, software management (YaST if you use it), and obviously the relevent zypper commands (refresh repos, distribution upgrade, and also update). KDE or Gnome? Either way, you may have to worry about recovering desktop settings. I’ve used zypper dup successfully from 11.2 to 11.3, 11.3 to 11.4, and 11.4 to 12.1, with relatively small issues to overcome mainly on the DE.