Hello,
I am using openSUSE 11.2 on my work computer and I wanna migrate to openSUSE 11.3. My concern is the fact that I have some “must have applications” that I had a lot of problems with them at installation on 11.2. Is there any possibility to create something like a restore point and if these applications are not functioning to come back to 11.2? Can you give me an advice in this situation?
Thanks
If these are must have and 11.2 runs ok why change? Updating is always a crapshoot And problem apps are almost a guarantee that there will be problems. I urge a new install.
You can do a binary backup of your root and restore if there is a show stopper. Checkout Clonezilla
I wanna update to the new features added to openSUSE 11.3. And also I like the ideea of experimenting the new stuff.
Thanks for backup ideea.
I have multiple partitions for the OS, and symlink my Documents and bin folders and various dotfiles into my home directory:
Cool Solutions: Install Linux Frequently, Without the Hassle
Interesting article, and pretty much how I partition my machines as well.
For @ionpetrache: in my opinion, follow the instructions from the Novell site as posted. The most important thing that I use is to NOT have a separate /home partition. Instead, I store all my “architecture independent” files, such as documents, spreadsheets, source code, etc. etc. on my (shared) /data partition and have nothing but KDE/Gnome configuration files in my /home folder, which is on the root / partition. That way, when I installed 11.3 on my 2nd partition, I got a brand-new /home folder and my /data files were untouched. That way, I could safely migrate the KDE settings from old to new and revert back if there were any problems.
This way, my upgrade to 11.3 really only took me a couple of hours and I still have the 11.2 system if I need to go back.
twelveeighty’s method is the one I have used for several years multibooting with versions of openSUSE and testing other distros. I too used it to install 11.3 while retaining my 11.2 partitions. I agree with the advantage of keeping /home and the settings unique to each system. However if you do go for this method, make sure you understand as much as possible about the way grub works generically and how to correctly edit its menu.lst file. Also make sure you understand how YaST>System>Boot Loader works for different settings, and how the openSUSE Installer uses it. Of course you may already have that knowledge. 
One more thing I forgot to mention: on my /data partition, the files and folders use “my” local user permissions. Since this partition is shared between my installations, I ALWAYS create users with the EXACT same username in the exact same order on the new distro installation (in most cases, there is only 1 user in addition to root). I’m not a filesystem expert, but the result of this is that when I log into the new distro, the files on the /data partition show the exact same group/owner and user permissions as if nothing happened.
I do not know if this works the same if you mix two different distro flavors (e.g. openSUSE and Fedora), since I presume this is tied to what “user UID” the distro creates the first user with. On openSUSE, this is 1000, I think.
That’s a good point(s) about permissions, and the UID is important, and best kept the same across multibooted distros. I recently got caught (PCLinuxOS 2010 IIRC) where the installer allocated UID 500, where openSUSE starts with UID 1000 (as do others). It was either that or the PCLOS userid was given a groupid (GID) of the same name but that GID was 500. openSUSE doesn’t do that, and normally defaults to the users group GID 100. No real problem, since you can change UID and GID as required. You may have to delete a user or group and add it again to make the change, depending on the distro’s utilty.