No, I don’t mean the last time I will install 11.2 but the last computer I have to upgrade to 11.2. Mostly went well with a couple of major glitches.
I decided to upgrade my workhorse to 11.2 yesterday. I decided on a fresh install to get a new ext4 FS for / rather than convert a ext3 FS. In preparation I made backups of etc opt root srv var in /home/11.1 (/home is a separate XFS partition). Both / and /home are software RAID1.
First glitch was a kernel crash when I booted with the default params. It worked with failsafe so I tried something less drastic, no ACPI and this made it work. I still don’t know why, I have to research why my mobo doesn’t like ACPI. Especially when acpi=off wasn’t needed in 11.1.
Second medium glitch came when partitioning. Naturally I had to reject the automatic suggestion, because it wanted to destroy the RAID. In the manual partitioner I had to use redetect and load previous configuration to get it to see the disks as they were in 11.1. I formatted only / and installed 11.2.
Third major glitch came at the first reboot. GRUB couldn’t find the files. After a bit of poking around, reinstalling grub and rebuilding initrd, I noticed that the root device in menu.lst was wrong. On the disks the first partition is swap, not /. Changing (hd0,0) to (hd0,1) everywhere in menu.lst fixed that.
Once up, I started to bring all the network services back up again, starting with DNS.
Here’s a tip for anybody configuring services on openSUSE. Whenever you install a service, always install the corresponding yast2 module, e.g. yast2-dns-server for bind and use the YaST config for the first run. That way you get to find out which config files are needed. Even if you will eventually manage the config files with a text editor, do use YaST config to create the initial configuration.
This is particularly important in the case of postfix. Several people mentioned they didn’t find /etc/postfix/relay. It was present here. I assume that the YaST config must have created it. Also I prefer to customise postfix via /etc/sysconfig/postfix which controls both main.cf and master.cf. This way I had no problems configuring it to work with gmail’s TLS. There is one patch to the SuSEconfig script needed to handle CApath and CAfile, let me know if you need it, it’s only two lines.
My sound cards were not in the order I wanted and that my recording scripts expected, so I edited modprobe.d/50-sound.conf to fix. It can also be done by deleting and reenabling the sound card entries in YaST, which is probably safer and doesn’t require a restart.
aumix is no longer in the standard repo but in contrib, possibly because it uses the OSS API. I should convert my scripts to use amixer or something like that some day.
I copied the module options I knew were needed for the TV tuner from the old /etc.
I found that the old fmtools wouldn’t work on the tuner. Searching around it seems that recent kernels have removed the v4l1 API. Eventually I found the maintainer of the tools had issued a v4l2 version on Dec 13. See, it pays to wait a while after new-fangled releases come out.
I installed restricted formats via one-click-install and it all worked.
All sorts of favourite packages and software were missing, but this was simply a matter of lots of zypper install commands.
I found that Thunderbird 3 doesn’t support Lightning, but apparently a 1.0 release of Lightning is due any day now. In the meantime I can use a separate Sunbird calendar.
So currently only the LDAP database isn’t restored yet. I’ll have to reload the old LDIF. It isn’t urgent because it’s only used by mail programs as a directory and it isn’t that useful because there is no modify access from user programs anyway.
I would give the experience a 7 out of 10. There were a couple of potential show stoppers if I hadn’t been able to figure them out. But then this machine is quite customised, so it doesn’t represent a typical desktop.
