I am currently considering migrating an openSUSE X86-64 system from 11.3 to 11.4. There seem to be 2 possibilities, upgrade or reinstall. Opinion seems to be divided on the process of upgrading from the DVD.
I have not been able to find any reasonable guide to using either method to migrate an 11.3 system to 11.4 and have the 11.4 system in the same working state as the 11.3 system was. What I have found for the reinstall method is trivial. for the upgrade method I have seen a reference to running rcrpmconfigcheck but I have been unable to find a man page for it on my 11.3 system or via google.
Does such a guide exist? It should be created by the openSUSE project for each release.
If it works the upgrade process looks to be the best method. The last 2 migrations were via the install method. 10 to 11 but also 32 to 64 bit and then 11.1 to 11.3 onto a new machine before moving the data across. Both rebuilds took many days.
I have seen many posts saying that it is very quick to rebuild the system. As little as 2 hours has been quoted. I have not yet seen an explanation of how they do it. I suspect that they rebuild systems regularly and have it all scripted or their systems are very simple. An explanation of how it is done would be interesting.
Given that I do migrations once or twice a year, building and testing a script to do the migration is probably not worth the effort especially as the only test machine is very old and slow
On 2011-06-18 00:36, vindevienne wrote:
> I have not been able to find any reasonable guide to using either
> method to migrate an 11.3 system to 11.4 and have the 11.4 system in the
You looked in the wrong place. You have it in the admin book and in the
wiki. Two places, link given here in several posts.
> I have seen many posts saying that it is very quick to rebuild the
> system. As little as 2 hours has been quoted. I have not yet seen an
> explanation of how they do it.
It is very simple: they don’t have to rebuild anything, everything they
need is the home files. The system is left to defaults and automatics. Just
network, printer, little more.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
On 06/18/2011 12:36 AM, vindevienne wrote:
>
> Does such a guide exist? It should be created by the openSUSE project
> for each release.
two different but ‘supported’ guides:
http://tinyurl.com/35p966c
http://tinyurl.com/6kvoflv
personally, i recommend neither–too high a chance of something old left
laying around on the drive to muck up my future…
i usually do a complete, fresh install and then join in off machine
saved data…
others, have their preferences…
i’ve found that trying to ‘save’ the extra two or three hours to do it
my way is often soon lost chasing around why this or that does not work
as expected, if at all…
and, as a benefit all of those things i installed the last time and used
once, are gone!
ymmv
–
dd
http://is.gd/bpoMD
On 2011-06-18 09:49, DenverD wrote:
> personally, i recommend neither–too high a chance of something old left
> laying around on the drive to muck up my future…
It works much better than you think 
As always, what you read here is about the failures. The success histories
do not make to the press.
I have been doing it for more than a decade
Installing fresh a complicated system, where there is a lot of stuff that
is not in “home”, takes a lot of time. Specially if you do not remember
everything you did. It is not a question of hours, but entire days, even weeks.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
On 06/18/2011 01:08 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
> Installing fresh a complicated system, where there is a lot of stuff that
> is not in “home”, takes a lot of time. Specially if you do not remember
> everything you did. It is not a question of hours, but entire days, even weeks.
well, i am a simple man with a simple system…because i like stable,
dependable, etc…
i also try to take notes of the changes i make to configs, the apps i
add, the default installed junk i remove (so far in 11.4: appArmor,
pluseAudio, kpackagekit, openJDK and probably others) and etc, so during
initial install can pre-delete the junk (by never installing it) and
install the non-default stuff and i’m most of the way to a good to go
system…once i move the data in and make the config changes…
not a two week thing for me…i think this 11.4 was mostly done in the
first day…well, first few hours actually…
[except for i couldn’t figure out how to get the internal mic
working–duh, it was easy, once i focused on the issue.]
–
dd
http://is.gd/bpoMD
On 2011-06-19 14:05, DenverD wrote:
> not a two week thing for me…i think this 11.4 was mostly done in the
> first day…well, first few hours actually…
If instead of removing AA you take the time to correct it, it takes much
longer. Plus setting up and testing the databases, postfix, amavis, etc.
Plus correcting the known bugs that have been reported.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)