I have been looking at using openSUSE 11.2 64 bit on a system that runs a small database containing live data, database development, web development with eclipse, php, java, apache server, samba server for a couple of other machines, photo editing and some other things.This can almost certainly be done on Windows and probably also a Mac.
Looking at this forum as well as others, things that are broken tend not to get fixed until the next release or version. Also, understandably, security fixes are provided for only reasonable current versions of openSUSE.
There is an article at Linux Magazine that states openSUSE has recognised the need to provide upgrades and this is possible with 11.2.
This forum and others give the impression that the only safe way to install 11.2 is a clean install. Also while you can restore /home, this can also result in problems due to configuration files held in users home directories.
I may be wrong but it appears to me that the main cause of this problem is KDE4.
A clean install is very expensive. It can take up to 2 weeks to get my system back to a fully working state. While in theory this can be automated it is not worth the effort for 1 or 2 machines. It is also not possible unless you have a spare machine to test the rebuild on.
Is there a way to run a linux desktop/server (SUSE or other) and be able to upgrade. I can understand that going from 32 to 64 bit is a clean install and possibly from version 9 to version 11. Going from version 11.1 to 11.2 should not require a clean install and probably nor should going from 10.3 to 11
A clean install every 2 years or possibly every 18 months may be acceptable but twice in 8 months is not
As a general observation, development teams and packaging teams know what they have changed and should be able to produce upgrading code relatively easily. A user who restores their home directory containing hidden incompatible config files will have a hard time identifying any associated problems. Clearing users config files to be safe tends to make you unpopular.
Upgrading can be done with zypper dup, after replacing the 11.1 repos with the 11.2 ones, but it’s not without a risk currently and some things may get messed up (though people have done sucessful upgrades with zypper without issues)
As for the support time, SUSE has an 18 months support cycle where patches/security updates/etc are provided. If you need more, then either buy into SLE or use CentOS if you don’t want to pay/have the money
The KDE4 issues can be easily fixed too and all one needs to do is either remove or rename the hidden .kde4 directory in /home/username
Do bear in mind that most people are running openSUSE as ‘production’ systems and not encountering problems - you only see the ones who have encountered problems on this forum; so it is not representative of the overall openSUSE experience.
Upgrades are always possible, but regardless of the opreating system, I think you will find that the consensus is for the best possible reliable system a “clean install” is always the best choice.
There can be and often are problems with any upgrade in any operating system.
All that said you don’t have to upgrade when every new release comes out. In fact for the things you mentioned I can’t imagine why someone would want to.
In fact Novells SLED would probably be a better option.
I am aware that clean installs are better than upgrades. I have been doing a mixture of clean upgrades and installs from about SUSE 7. This includes skipping some releases.
Having done a clean install from 32 bit openSUSE 10.3 to 64 bit 11.1 and still not having got everything working properly, I have little desire to start another clean install. My problems seem to be KDE4 related and the official way to get KDE4.3 on the system seems to be to upgrade to 11.2. Also I am not sure what is happening to Firefox as I believe Mozilla is terminating security updates to 3.0 which is shipped with 11.1
I have done many upgrades without problems prior to openSUSE. I get the impression that a decision was taken not to support upgrades, or to at least actively discourage it.
With regard to SLE. Does SLE properly support upgrades from release to release and across versions?
Upgrades are supported, and with SLES 10 SP2 to SP3 there is a working
online upgrade (via the patch channel) that you can use. Most people
still seem to use the offline method (drop in a DVD) but there have been a
few trying the online way too. I’ve done the online way only and it
worked for me, though it was a system I built simply to test that
functionality so it wasn’t as “real-world” as most.
Good luck.
vindevienne wrote:
> Thankyou for your reply.
>
> I am aware that clean installs are better than upgrades. I have been
> doing a mixture of clean upgrades and installs from about SUSE 7. This
> includes skipping some releases.
>
> Having done a clean install from 32 bit openSUSE 10.3 to 64 bit 11.1
> and still not having got everything working properly, I have little
> desire to start another clean install. My problems seem to be KDE4
> related and the official way to get KDE4.3 on the system seems to be to
> upgrade to 11.2. Also I am not sure what is happening to Firefox as I
> believe Mozilla is terminating security updates to 3.0 which is shipped
> with 11.1
>
> I have done many upgrades without problems prior to openSUSE. I get the
> impression that a decision was taken not to support upgrades, or to at
> least actively discourage it.
>
> With regard to SLE. Does SLE properly support upgrades from release to
> release and across versions?
>
>
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
With regard to removing (or renaming) the .kde directories. This appears to delete (or make unavailable) the users kmail configuration and all the users e-mail. I think it will also kill off korganisers data and possibly other things depending upon what other kde apps are used. Perhaps such advice should carry a health warning.
I have used KMAIL for many years without problems. However I now think that it is wise to avoid KDE apps and I shall migrate my mail systems to thunderbird
I regard deleting the .kde directories as not far off a clean install. I come back to the point that the KDE development team know what they have changed. It should be relatively easy for the KDE Development team to produce code to upgrade the KDE configuration and data files. I am not sure how a user of the KDE system can reasonably be expected to know which files if any they can copy into the new .kde directories from the old .kde directories.
I do not believe that KDE 4.1 is as stable as it should be but my major concern is dolphin. I use dolphin but I am very careful as I believe that it can result in the loss of data. I have had a few occurances where I have asked dolphin to change permissions or copy files and the change or copy looks to have completed but there has been no change. However doing exactly the same thing with kde3 file manager works without problems. The other thing that is annoying but not the end of the world are the modality problems in kde4. Open up a drop down menu in an app and the desk top panel will not pop up.
With regard to problems in the forums not being a real guide to how software generally works, I have been developing applications and supporting very large systems for very many years. I am quite good at estimating if a reported problem is a real problem and if it is likely to affect me. Someone not liking dolphin is not a problem. Problems with hardware that I do not have (I have an nvidia graphics card) are not of immediate concern although if the graphics card problems are not fixed rapidly it is likely to seriously affect the use of linux as a desk top system.
Prior to posting this thread I have been going through this and other forums. I was comming to the conclusion that there was not a reasonable upgrade process for openSUSE. This was not based on the problems reported but the answers provided when problems occured or the upgrade process was queried. The responses I have received so far have done nothing to change my view of the upgrade process
For may years I have worked very large financial organisations, communications companies and others. My laptop running suse linux has always gone with me. I am very reluctant to drop linux but the effort and time involved to do a clean install for a release to release upgrade is unacceptable.
Actually, vindevienne raises some valid points. Perhaps many of the complaints here about KDE could be blamed on the fact that long-time KDE 3 users can’t figure out how to migrate all of their settings from 3 to 4. I know that’s been one of my problems (and is the biggest reason why I’m still on 11.1, with KDE 3.5; I don’t want to take the time to figure out how to make it do what I want).
His argument is spot-on, as far as I’m concerned. There should have been a way to migrate everything in the .kde directory from 3 to 4.
to vindevienne:
That said, y’pays your money, y’takes your chances. At the end of the day, the botton line is that OpenSUSE is a free distribution. If you choose to pay for Windows, that’s certainly your choice, and God bless you for it. But I, for one, am willing to put up with some changes from one release to the next to get a very good, very secure operating system for free.
Doesn’t mean you don’t raise some valid points - I said so above - but I am willing to forgive some things in OpenSUSE that I wouldn’t tolerate for a minute in Windows. And the truth is, in spite of the fact that KDE 4 is a pain to config the way I like, I still prefer it to Windows.
If we’re talking about things breaking other things, haven’t you ever had a Service Pack from Microsoft break up stuff? I certainly have – in fact, one of my deep, secret worries is that one of our production networks at our radio stations CANNOT be upgraded to SP3. CANNOT. It breaks the whole system. So … I have to isolate them from the Internet and make darned sure that no one even thinks about considering the possibility of inserting a pen drive or CD and installing an unauthorized app. It keeps me up at nights sometimes.
Indeed I believe using 11.2 as the basis is the best way to update to the most currently stable version of KDE4, which is 4.3.4. Note, for example, that SuSE-GmbH who typically ONLY provide security updates, are planning an unprecedented (for openSUSE) update of KDE on 11.2 from KDE-4.3.1 to KDE-4.3.4. They are currently sorting that in a “KDE stable” repos and once it is deemed “stable enough” ( ? ) it will then be be available on the official openSUSE-11.2 “UPDATE” repository. Purportedly this is happening for 11.2 only because of the similarity between 11.2 and a SLED version, and Novell want to reduce the maintenance effort by making the KDE version the same on those two products.
Reference openSUSE-11.1 and KDE-4.3.4, I have it running very nicely on my Dell Studio 1537 laptop. But to install KDE-4.3.4, I started off by installing openSUSE-11.1 not with KDE-4.1.3, but rather I used a liveCD from “the KDE Four Live” CD here](http://home.kde.org/~binner/kde-four-live/)that gave me openSUSE-11.1 with KDE-4.3.2 already installed and functioning well. From there it was a trivial matter to update to KDE-4.3.4 using the repository noted below for KDE:/43.
I am very careful now, though, in only judiciously apply updates via
IMHO ‘for production’ you are best to stay away from all that, and only go with the official KDE updates.
Still, if you can change your decision wrt only staying on 11.1, and can confirm your PC’s hardware will work with 11.2 (especially the graphic drivers which have caused some ATI and some Intel users some grief) then you could install 11.2 and ultimately benefit from KDE-4.3.4 when the updates show up in the “official” Novell/SuSE-GmbH “UPDATE” repository for 11.2.
There is also Gnome. … While I am a big KDE user, I’ve been trialing Gnome, and aside from the sound implementation (which I find works rather poorly on my Sandbox PC, as opposed to KDE’s sound implementation which works fine) I confess I find the Gnome desktop rather nice.
I find Firefox 3.5.7 works well on openSUSE and is stable. I see no need to stick with Firefox 3.0 on a system for ‘production’ use. Just the contrary.
I’ve always been one to do a clean install from openSUSE version to openSUSE version. As long as one is not changing the underlying file system (ie from Ext3 to Ext4) or the desktop (from KDE3 to KDE4 or from an immature KDE-4.0.3 to KDE-4.3.x, or Gnome to KDE) I find retaining the /home does not cause problems. Some common sense as to the scope of the update that one is applying is IMHO important in the decision as to whether /home should be retained.
wrt openSUSE-11.2 now offering an update feature, in truth, that was available in previous openSUSE versions, but its use was a bit more problematic. Even now, with 11.2, given this is relatively new “official” feature, I would be reluctant to use it. There are likely still bugs involved, and if one is used to using packages from a lot of 3rd party repositories one could end up with a lot of dependencies to sort when doing an 11.2 to 11.3 (or 11.2 to 12.0) update (once 11.3 or 12.0 become available). Still, thats just my speculation/conservatism coming through, and we are many months away from knowing how in practise such an update will work.
I do not think it does, but you may be best asking this on a SLE official support forum (our forum is for openSUSE and not SLE).
Why so long? I am typically fully up in 2 hours after starting an install. That includes all my 3rd party apps, includes all my printer configured, scanner configured, … etc… Definitely not 2 weeks for me. ONLY 2 hours.
Having a sandbox PC is a good idea. Our local PC shop is selling PCs without an OS for 69 euros! Thats just over $100 US. These PCs (Fujitsu-Siemens Esprimo E5600’s, with Sempron 3000+, 512MB DDR400 RAM, 80GB hard drive) are in the most part more capable than my Sandbox PC, and can easily be connected via a KVM switch to reduce real estate requirements.
In truth, such a test Sandbox PC is now within reach financially of most people.
As for it taking time to setup a Sandbox PC, my view is it saves me time, as I can make more informed decisions based on what I learn from brief use of the Sandbox PC.
One can also setup a “sandbox” partition, but that requires a level of familiarity with Grub, that not everyone has. Plus with Grub2 just around the corner for inclusion in a future openSUSE version, I would be reluctant to adopt that separate sandbox partition approach my self.
Indeed the separation between developers and packagers, and between packagers and users, can be large, and hence we in the community need to work together to bring these diverse groups closer together.
My surmise is that all the distros, not just openSUSE, that are using Firefox 3.0 will have to send out an upgrade to Firefox 3.5 before the end of Jan 2010. You think that the KDE project is dictatorial to deprecate KDE3.5? Well, the Mozilla project is brutal in comparison with KDE. You have to look around a bit on their home page to find 3.0. And they are testing 3.6 at the moment.
I’m sure there will be the odd user bemoaning a broken add-on, but by and large 3.5 is better than 3.0.
I appreciate your contribution, yours are valid points, especially on the migration. However:
Have you had actually a look into .kde? The files of mail and organizers are easily to be found. You can copy them on an USB stick and then copy them back overwriting the new ones. Will give an error on the first run but not on the second for what I have read (did not do it yet).
Your point of critique regarding migration is absolutely right. In OpenFate there is/was even a request for easy updating kde3 to kde4 and by reading the comments of two developers it seamed hat they…substantially believed they had already done it and found out they hadn’t.
Mail applications: be aware that the new version of Thunderbird may leave you with some “surprise”. The comments I have read especially about usability, where not enthusiastic at all.
11.1: was and is a buggy version. The fact that you have still problems with it concerns that version of openSUSE and the try to make live together 3.5 and 4 on the same machine. Nearly all of the problem I experienced where originating there. 11.0 had no issue at all. If you need long term support the policy is to incentive you buying the SLE edition. Which is honestly also logic. If an industry that is investing quite a lot of money into development of openSUSE is trying to sell for money its products then this should be acknowledged as part of the game (I do not refer to certain “strategic alliances or let’s say agreements” that are IMHO the wrong direction).
One last point: a change of major desktop version like 3.5 vs 4.x is not happening every five minutes. Maybe before thinking of abandoning a validly integrated set of desktop applications (I am quite happy with kmail (tried evolution (not happy) and thunderbird (left me quite indifferent) you should wait with 11.1 up to December when it is really out of maintenance and then install the 11.3. Maybe then some “upgrade feature” will be there, and for sure KDE4 will be even better.
FYI: FF 3.5.7 can be updated from the build service (I am using it in this very moment) and works flawlessly on 11.1.
> For may years I have worked very large financial organisations,
> communications companies and others. My laptop running suse linux has
> always gone with me. I am very reluctant to drop linux but the effort
> and time involved to do a clean install for a release to release upgrade
> is unacceptable.
you (and some others here…and, lots elsewhere, and me) have the
unfortunate situation of remembering (for example) SuSE pre-10 when
the nice folks in Germany who only released when they had a darn
STABLE and reliable product…
i challenge you to find someone who in good faith (and absent
ignorance of “granddad’s linux”) can call any snapshot of openSUSE
11.x a stable and reliable enterprise ready, production system…
in my (humble?) opinion what we are about here (in the openSUSE
community) is TESTING and squashing bugs in a never_ending beta for
the next enterprise edition…which is (i hear) both stable and
reliable…it is called SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) or SUSE
Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) and is available for purchase (and
support) from Novell.com
i’ve never tried it, but i do know they have a free download, trial
version that includes install support…
i’m typing from openSUSE 10.3 and in a quandary because i share your
opinion that this bug searching treadmill is too much work…i may go
to debian, when forced off of 10.3
by the way, did you know that Ubuntu is an African word meaning
“I can’t set up Debian”
For me it means “I really dont have the time to wait 2 hours for debian to fully install with a user interface nor do I want to waste 6 disks on some garbage I might not need”
I really wish classic debain had a condensed disk of some kind, I know it has a live but it doesnt do much.
Debian classic is no longer a hard install though, but setting up multimedia in it is a bit of a challenge.
Linux for production use: yes. openSUSE for production use: yes.
Spend half the money you would have to spend on licenses another way, in people, and you’re pretty safe. That’s where managers’ problems are. They accept gladly they don’t have to pay for licenses, but when it comes to spending that money on some extra support, they consider it a loss, whilst still saving money.
Hi
It’s the gecko counters! people = operating cost, software = capital
expense hence the dilemma as they always want the operating costs
reduced and capital expense can be depreciated.
–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (x86_64) Kernel 2.6.27.39-0.3-default
up 5 days 10:19, 4 users, load average: 0.00, 0.10, 0.15
GPU GeForce 8600 GTS Silent - CUDA Driver Version: 190.18
Indeed. A Unix/Linux admin scales very well and is worth the pay. A good admin with an armory of tools can keep 10 servers running at only a small effort over that for 5 servers and certainly not 2x.
I find you inquiry quite interesting – perhaps I can provided some insight.
First things that jumps to my mind is the use of a box for both development and holding live (production) data. If that is your intention then neither OS11.2 or any other os is likely to suite your needs - development and production do not mix.
KDE4 (and KDE3 in the past) have a host of problems, for sure – stability and security are real concerns with X. I am a “Systems Engineer” and work with companies that have very high uptime requirements for their production systems – not a single production box ever runs any form of X at all. Most customers I work with are on SLES, RHEL, or in several instances CentOS; quite a few are still running CentOS or RHEL 4.6, btw. Updates of any sort are carefully tested on sandbox systems.
On my personal Linux at home (OS11.2 now) and my 2 OSX boxes at work, AND my Linux work box: I keep all my really important docs/data stored under /home on one machine and access this data via nfs. I backup one /home dir and everything is saved. Also, all code is checked into svn, which of course is on a separate machine.
I recently built a new Linux machine (all new hardware) and moved from Ubuntu 8.04 to OS11.2 – the entire conversion took 2 days, including building the box, moving 1TB of data, and finding and fixing issues with driver for lmsensors and an Intel NIC.
It might be a good idea to think about running your db app on a different machine – maybe running CentOS or even *BSD; both are very stable.
