Upgrade from 10.2 to 11.1

Can one upgrade from openSUSE 10.2 to 11.1 online? Can one upgrade with just the ISO images, booting from the 11.1 DVD while running 10.2? In a nutshell, how can I find the ways to upgrade my system w/o losing my current environment?
Thanks.:slight_smile:

Sorry, but that’s not possible.

The closest you’re likely to get is reinstalling without wiping the /home partition (assuming it’s separate).

Search the forums - this gets asked a lot.

10.2 did not create a /home partition as default; so if you had a default installation, you will need to back up /home and anything else, like mysql databases, which is stored outside /home, and then do a fresh install.

In practice, this will take you a lot less time than doing an update as an update goes through every file individually and the last time I did it took over 12 hours whereas a fresh install just lays folders down in groups and is normally over in 40 minutes or less if you use a CD.

Does this mean that there are major changes to files and folder structures that it’s not possible to do an upgrade? Is this not a major flaw of Suse (or Linux)? I would think that being able to easily upgrade to newer version should be a priority and would have been incorporated by now. To me it having to reinstall and then reconfigure everything seems like a lot of wasted time and off putting to new comers. I’m totally new to Linux so I’m not criticising, just trying to understand why upgrades to newer versions are not automated. I assume there is some technical reason.

Some distro’s handle it better than others. But regardless of the choice you will find people that do encounter problems.

There maybe what you’re describing a distupgrade coming in the next release. You do have the choice of doing it cold and have done for a while. Again mileage varies some will swear by it others will recommend against it.

If you value your data then I would recommend not doing it. You may come away fine but then maybe not. If you have a separate home then it is generally quite quick and painless, you can do a few bits to make it even more painless. i.e collect the configs you want, collect info about additional packages installed over a base install etc…

So no you can’t do a hot upgrade, but maybe possible soon.

Yes you can do a cold upgrade(New install media and upgrade not install), but you’ll find a mixed response to recommending it.

If you want a distribution that you can continuously update, go for Gentoo; the philosophy of RedHat, SuSE and Ubuntu has been to add significant improvements to each new distribution that cannot be ported back to significantly earlier distributions.

As community distributions are only supported for 18 months to 2 years, you need to update while your existing distribution is current; otherwise the leap involves so many changes that only a reinstall is practicable. Bear in mind that a lot of the work is done by volunteers and it is unreasonable to expect them to keep everything up-to-date for every previous distribution.

I upgraded my mother’s openSUSE-10.2 to 11.1, but her setup was very simple. In her case I simply did a complete re-install, after first backing up all of her data to a different hard drive.

openSUSE-11.1 installs very fast. Its the fastest openSUSE to install that I can remember.

Or Debian Testing, or Arch - where you’ll be enjoined to read the manual, rather than the source code. :wink: