upgrade 11.2/kde4 etc, a confused ramble

English Open Chat
#1

Here are some of my ramblings; your thoughts and rambles are very welcome!

I have dual boot Windows XP on a 300gb SATA, openSuse 11.1 kde 3.5.1 on a 120Gb PATA/IDE. I installed openSuse as an experiment. I now prefer openSuse to XP (no surprise there to most of you, I am sure!)

So I am considering moving to 11.2 and kde4, should I wait until the official release, or plunge ahead with the milestone 8?
Would I lose all my settings for compiz etc?
and my apps like kmail and Firefox vBox etc?

I would like to “swap” my XP install to the 120Gb, and suse to the 300Gb as I hardly ever use XP these days, and I download “stuff” to suse, space and to a lesser extent speed would be better on the 300Gb.
I don’t, ATM have a CD DVD read/writer

stephen@linux-oqc9:~> df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb6 20G 6.1G 13G 33% /
udev 939M 196K 939M 1% /dev
/dev/sdb7 69G 33G 33G 51% /home
/dev/sdb2 11G 93M 10G 1% /windows/D
/dev/sda1 254G 173G 82G 68% /windows/C

? Is udev my “swap” ? I think I am sure I made it 2Gb, (conky says 2Gb as well) but hey ho!

I am sure I could shrink the windows install to < 120Gb.
Do I have to “clone” an install, or can I use a “snapshot” progam?
So could I make all free space on the 300Gb available and transplant my current suse install on to it, then learn how to tell GRUB that that is where it now lives?
reformat the 120Gb, and move my XP install from the 300Gb to it, and once more fiddle GRUB to make it aware.
Install 11.2 on to the newly freed up space on the 300Gb where XP was, with a bit of luck GRUB would work out the partitions (?), but tell it to share/use the /home partition already present from 11.1
then delete 11.1 and resize the partitions to make all the space available to 11.2.
I guess I would be best doing this using a bootable USB stick with some kind of skinny LINUX, or live openSuse? (or eeeek! :o:O BartPe or another bootable DOS type mini OS)

or… simply install 11.2 to the free space on 300Gb and copy the /home to it, wipe the 120Gb and clone XP to there, then resize as above?

I know this is not the place to ask for help, but this is such an incoherent ramble I would like to invite you all to consider if this is a reasonable way of doing it, or am I completely on the wrong track?
(Mods/admins please feel free to move it if you see fit)

#2

This question is easy …

Wait. :slight_smile:

Only install 11.2 milestone8 if one wishes to do last minute testing. And then when the main 11.2 GM (goldmaster) release comes out, install from scratch. Don’t update. Yes update will likely work, but why take the chance there may be some obscure item that will cause a problem because one did an update. Simply wait for 11.2 GM. And install 11.2 GM.

In fact, my recommendation is to wait a couple of months after 11.2 GM is out, and then install 11.2 GM. There will be bugs in 11.2 GM that have not been detected yet, and by waiting a couple of months, you provide time for those bugs to be fixed.

#3

Short n’ sweet as ever CPU, TY! I will probably take your advice, in fact I probably would have done by default as it will take me that long to learn enough about GRUB/SuperGRUB to be sure I can get back to where I am now if all goes t*** up.:shame:

stephen@linux-oqc9:~> df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdb6 20G 6.1G 13G 33% /
udev 939M 196K 939M 1% /dev
/dev/sdb7 69G 33G 33G 51% /home
/dev/sdb2 11G 93M 10G 1% /windows/D
/dev/sda1 254G 173G 82G 68% /windows/C

? Is udev my “swap” ? I think I am sure I made it 2Gb, (conky says 2Gb as well) but hey ho!

I am confused about this!

Has anyone used Clonezilla ?
It looks like the sort of tool which I could maybe use to move my installs around. I am also wondering whether I could make a USB stick DUAL BOOT to clonezilla/supergrub, using supergrub itself?

#4

Please post the result of this from su terminal:

fdisk -l

This will tell us about your partitions properly. :slight_smile:

#5

here you go Caf… :wink:

stephen@linux-oqc9:~> su -c 'fdisk -l'
Password:

Disk /dev/sda: 300.0 GB, 300090728448 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 36483 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x6bf99939

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1       33146   266245213+   7  HPFS/NTFS

Disk /dev/sdb: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x2a4e2a4d

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1        1314    10554673+  83  Linux
/dev/sdb2            1315        2623    10514542+   c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/sdb3   *        2624       14593    96149025    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/sdb5            2624        2885     2104483+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb6            2886        5496    20972826   83  Linux
/dev/sdb7            5497       14593    73071621   83  Linux
#6

No, and you won’t see your swap from df -h, free is your friend.

#7

With that output you can see swap. And if necessary explain to us what you want to do by making ref to those listed partitions.

#8

@ wakou, when the opensuse 11.2 goldmaster arrives, don’t forget to shrink your xp to the smallest partition possible to make room for more happy linux exploration.:wink:

#9

Thankyou guys,
@ Conram, the plan is to shrink WinXp to < 120Gb, and put it on the 120Gb Drive, leaving the whole 300Gb drive for openSuse, this should not be a problem, as most of what is currently on the XP/NTFS is music/radio/films etc and can easily be moved to an ext3 partition, or even left in a seperate NTFS partition and made accessible to Suse, aside from that I have never used Access, Powerpoint, Excel, etc, or Moviemaker, or indeed 80% of the bloatware on my XP install

TY never heard of free b4! I still don’t know what udev is though, but I am sure that google is my friend as well.

#10

Did you consider removing XP entirely? From what I’ve read in your posts you’re moving away from it at the speed of light. If you don’t use it anymore, dump it.

On udev: “man udev”. The top part explains what it is/does.

#11

EEEK!:o:O:O

I am not sure I am quite ready to take that final step.

Perhaps, like a recovering alcoholic, I need to keep a bottle of gin around the place, “just in case”.
I do occasionally boot to MSWinXP native to check whether behaviour under openSuse, or in a virtual MSWin is a software/config/driver issue, or is actually a hardware problem, or a problem caused remotely, or is caused by a particular browser or linux app. I used it recently for instance to see whether my headphones would mute my speakers using an entirely different driver set/OS. When I found that they actually did not mute under a native MSWIN boot either, I decided it was possibly for the best not to waste any more of OldCPU’s valuable time and brainspace on an issue which might well be a hardware/wiring problem.
However, the reason I am going to put MSWinXP on to the smaller PATA drive, and openSUSE onto the larger SATA, is the idea that I may indeed at some point in the future, detach it and place it in a box clearly labelled:
“TO BE OPENED ONLY IN THE DIREST OF EMERGENCIES”

Err well sort of! I read it and am still in the dark, I guess I am just very stupid, and also that I need to do some more homework.

#12

While skimming thru the thread, I noted this.

Have you checked to ensure this will work on your motherboard? Some PCs will NOT allow one to have both a PATA and SATA drive on the same PC.

#13

Perhaps, like a recovering alcoholic, I need to keep a bottle of gin around the place, “just in case”.

I kept the dual boot around for a while until several years ago I finally decided to purge windows and go 100% Linux. I have not found a need to keep Windows around for normal day to day stuff.

However, I did recently re-add a small Windows partition to one of my computers for one thing: If you do firmware updates (on phones, routers, etc), I learned from experience that it’s sometimes best to have a native Windows partition available for that. I came close to bricking devices by attempting fw updates through a virtual machine. Some devices take fw updates through a vm just fine, but others get very temperamental about it.

If you don’t usually do firmware updates, you will eventually find that Windows is only taking disk space. :slight_smile:

#14

One could always run XP in some virtual environment. Then you can have the best of oth world simultaneously.

#15

I do Pickles, i have a vBOX with XP running to play poker, but this is no good for testing/faultfind porpoises, as above
@pontke good point there, BIOS updates etc too…
@OldCPU I have both drives installed ATM, I am going to exchange OS’es between the two, So openSuse can have the bigger better drive, and MSWinXP consigned to a dusty corner of the 120Gb PATA drive