Tumbleweed Upgrade Clarification

Hi all, please excuse the basic nature of my queries, but I have two questions about upgrading Tumbleweed.
I used the steps described in the following locations, among others:
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Upgrade_Tumbleweed

Basically, I cached the dup, then logged into a TTY and isolated to rescue.target.
Logged in as my (admin) user—not root—then zypper dupped.
As expected, zypper couldn’t connect to the repos but I already had the upgrade cached.
But, for some reason, zypper was saying that it would remove packages? Specifically, Discord, Steam, and another package.

Wasn’t sure why that was so I just ran zypper dupwithout changing to the rescue.target instead.
Went through that time with no issues.

My questions are:

  1. Why the different zypper results between rescue.target and graphical.target with the upgrade cached?
  2. Is it overkill to dup from the rescue.target? Is this the procedure that most people follow? Or is everyone dupping from the DE?

Thanks!

My suggestion:

Logout. And then use
CTRL-ALT-F1
to get to a virtual console, where you can login as root at the command line. You can run “zypper dup” there.

Occasionally, you might see the graphic environment reappear during the update. If that happens, just repeat the
CTRL-ALT-F1
to get back to your command line session.

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It’s like Deja Vu in here … seems I just read someone else in another thread wanting to cache a dup (scratching my head)

Overkill.

  1. Don’t worry about an answer
  2. Yes, overkill. No, most do NOT follow this procedure.

Most of us do the very complicated:

zypper dup

There, done :+1:

And no need to drop out of a GUI. Overkill.

Personally, I’ve done this with TW for years - two desktops and two laptops. While logged into a KDE Plasma session, I do:

a) open up a windowed console (konsole app as I’m On KDE).
b) execute “su”
c) zypper dup
d) when finished, “exit”, then “exit” (to exit and close konsole).
e) reboot if required.

Easy peasy. No extra zypper commands that offer zero advantages.

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I have one comment though (sort of my ceterum censeo) , always use

su -

And in your KDE environment you can choose from the menu “Terminal - Super user mode” and that will do the su - for you, starting with asking for the root password. As a bonus it will spare you one exit at the end. :wink:

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Show the actual commands and their complete output in each case and someone may have an idea. We cannot look over your shoulder and see what you see.

Well, GNOME Software does only offline update which is the safest way. KDE Discover can also be configured to do it. As for myself, I do not care, but I can also handle potential issues during online update from within full desktop environment.

I do something similar. However, before the “zypper dup”, I do:

screen -L

That isolates the update (in a “screen” session), so that if the GUI crashes, the updating continues anyway. And I can look at “screenlog.0” to see how it went and whether it has finished.

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When I realized my “mis-guided” su command should have been “su -”, it was beyond the time to edit the post.

Anyway, and yes, I usually perform other commands while in the CLI, which is why I start at the user level konsole (i.e., my purpose is beyond running dup :+1: )

But I do appreciate the response /correction !!

Is F1 not GDM/Gnomes default session location? Doesn’t GDM/Gnome run on F1 or F2 in openSUSE? I’m fairly sure your recommendation would not work for a Fedora/Gnome user, even though I haven’t had GDM or Gnome installed since last century.

Anyway, it’s the reason why I recommend Ctrl-Alt-F3, which works whether X is running on F1, F2, F7 and/or F8. X here runs via DM only on F7, but when started with startx on most recent distros, openSUSE included, X runs on the same tty startx is run from.

FWIW, when I dup, it’s usually from F3, because that’s where I login for admin activity that I don’t want risking interfering with anything I run in X. Update/upgrade trouble can’t readily crash anything that isn’t running. :slight_smile:

@mrmazda it’s tty2, loginctl will show you…

For many years, I used CTRL-ALT-F2

At present, running KDE with GDM, that just gets me to my KDE session. And CTRL-ALT-F7 gets me a GDM login screen. So I use CTRL-ALT-F1. But use whatever works for you.

That is overkill, just run your Desktop, open a terminal and do “sudo zypper dup”

No need to logout or use resuce. After completing dup you will see a rquest for reboot. That is all.

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Thanks, everyone! Especially to @malcolmlewis for the step by step instructions.

@arvidjaar, if I figure if there are logs of the tty and where to find them, I’ll put them up for sure.

Running zypper dist-upgrade on top of a big stack of processes in the user slice is a crazy idea, in my opinion of course.

Real world users may want to dup by running a service in the system slice:

erlangen:~ # systemctl cat dup
# /etc/systemd/system/dup.service
[Unit]
Description=Distribution Upgrade 

[Service]
ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/nm-online
ExecStart=/usr/bin/zypper --non-interactive dist-upgrade
erlangen:~ # 

The service will terminate successfully even when the graphical session it got started from is killed. Comprehensive logging is available by default:

erlangen:~ # journalctl -q -u dup -g Consumed
May 28 20:57:19 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 2.708s CPU time.
May 29 22:52:12 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 1.159s CPU time.
May 31 04:43:01 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 4.315s CPU time.
May 31 06:10:57 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 1min 30.626s CPU time.
Jun 01 05:21:02 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 44.511s CPU time.
Jun 02 00:01:19 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 12.027s CPU time.
Jun 02 19:52:46 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 13.145s CPU time.
Jun 04 05:17:37 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 8.540s CPU time.
Jun 05 05:56:40 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 32.883s CPU time.
Jun 05 13:38:22 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 8.456s CPU time.
Jun 06 04:29:34 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 9.615s CPU time.
Jun 06 20:32:19 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 11.848s CPU time.
Jun 07 04:53:05 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 3.072s CPU time.
Jun 08 00:00:11 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 1.022s CPU time.
Jun 09 06:25:12 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 7.572s CPU time.
Jun 09 21:24:58 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 2min 18.222s CPU time.
Jun 10 03:15:33 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 12.424s CPU time.
Jun 10 18:58:16 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 2.801s CPU time.
Jun 11 03:16:17 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 10.004s CPU time.
Jun 11 05:04:11 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 8.057s CPU time.
Jun 11 19:28:56 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 57.897s CPU time.
Jun 12 22:21:09 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 3.827s CPU time.
Jun 13 20:19:08 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 51.645s CPU time.
Jun 14 05:39:05 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 4.688s CPU time.
Jun 14 09:48:51 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 4.045s CPU time.
Jun 14 15:31:19 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 24.987s CPU time.
Jun 15 05:08:52 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 4.637s CPU time.
Jun 16 05:17:36 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 2.203s CPU time.
Jun 26 20:00:14 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 6min 58.957s CPU time.
Jun 27 00:00:53 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 9.411s CPU time.
Jun 27 05:16:42 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 12.432s CPU time.
Jun 28 00:00:26 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 6.490s CPU time.
Jun 29 00:00:21 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 5.271s CPU time.
Jun 29 19:17:36 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 2.806s CPU time.
Jun 30 02:35:24 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 2.877s CPU time.
Jul 01 04:52:07 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 25.285s CPU time.
Jul 02 03:40:58 erlangen systemd[1]: dup.service: Consumed 1.060s CPU time.
erlangen:~ # 

Good you got it worked out !
Where’s malcom’s instructions? deleted ?

Where’s malcom’s instructions? deleted ?

Hey there, my mistake, I meant @myswtest’s reply—#3:

I clicked the wrong autocomplete.

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