upgrade from 11.3 to 11.4 -- good idea?

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

I’m currently running opensuse 11.3 with Gnome and I downloaded the 11.4 iso yesterday and was considering doing an over-the-top upgrade. But I’ve been browsing through the forums and it looks like a lot of people have been having issues with 11.4.

So what is the general consensus on 11.4 so far? Is it recommended to stay with 11.3? If I do try to upgrade, what types of “gotcha’s” am I likely to experience.

And since 11.4 comes with LibraOffice but 11.3 has OpenOffice, will it automatically remove the old and install the new or should I manuualy uninstall OO first?

#2

11.3 was a little bit quirky for me, and I’ve found 11.4 to be more stable and faster on my hardware. I did a clean install, though, and would recommend the same. Since you’ve been browsing the forums, I’m sure you’ve seen some of the issues from upgrading over 11.3.

LibreOffice will replace OpenOffice.org as fare as I know.

Whether or not to upgrade can be a tough decision. I kept 11.2 on my parents computer until they’re power supply fried, and I’ve since put 11.4 on there. I love checking out the latest and greatest and can deal with issues when they arise. My parents need the rock solid stability. It’s all a matter of preference. You can always use a live disk for a while before installing.

#3

The only problem with doing a clean install is that I’ve got quite a bit of apps installed in my 11.3 as well as customized settings and I don’t relish the idea of reinstalling everything and then reconfiguring everything. I remember in the 10.x days, I went from 10.1 to 10.2 to 10.3 with no problems but reading through the forum, it looks like 11.4 has been more problematic. I’d be interesting in hearing other’s experiences. Has anyone done a 11.3 to 11.4 inplace upgrade and had NO problems?

#4

On Wed, 13 Apr 2011 21:36:02 +0530, jgosney
<jgosney@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:

>
> The only problem with doing a clean install is that I’ve got quite a bit
> of apps installed in my 11.3 as well as customized settings and I don’t
> relish the idea of reinstalling everything and then reconfiguring
> everything. I remember in the 10.x days, I went from 10.1 to 10.2 to
> 10.3 with no problems but reading through the forum, it looks like 11.4
> has been more problematic. I’d be interesting in hearing other’s
> experiences. Has anyone done a 11.3 to 11.4 inplace upgrade and had NO
> problems?
>

i kept the /home partition in place and didn’t experience much
difficulties. most or many applications will need to be reinstalled
anyway, since their versions differ from 11.3-11.4, so i don’t see much
point trying to leave the other partitions in place. in case older files
don’t get replaced by ‘zypper dup’, that’s likely to lead to trouble. most
of the customization happens in /home, so you won’t have too much of your
efforts wasted.

–
phani.

#5

On 2011-04-13 18:06, jgosney wrote:

> Has anyone done a 11.3 to 11.4 inplace upgrade and had NO
> problems?

Here you will mostly see the problem histories, not the success histories.
And there are differences between live upgrade or DVD boot and upgrade.

11.4 is still young. On every version a lot of problems are discovered the
first month and it takes some time to correct them. I’m waiting.

My recommendation if you have the itching is to test the new version in a
spare partition, and if it works, do a full backup and upgrade the main
partition. If it goes bad, you can restore.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)

#6

My recommendation if you have the itching is to test the new version in a
spare partition, and if it works, do a full backup and upgrade the main
partition. If it goes bad, you can restore.

Or if you have the hardware, you can install Virtualbox and mess around with 11.4 while keeping your 11.3 in tact. It’s also easy to make and restore from snapshots if something goes terribly wrong.

#7

I’ve been using the same /home since OS 11.0 through every version up to 11.4, since 11.3 it’s been exported as an nfs mount to two other machines in conjuction with nis logins

It was a lot more finnicky in 11-11.2, but bear in mind that was from around when kde4 was coming in and maturing, than it was on installing the later ones, but hasn’t been much that didn’t ‘just work’ in the newer versions of most apps

I’ve currently got the machine the /home is exported from still running 11.3, and the two other machines I mount the exported nfs /home on running 11.4 without any glitches whatsoever

Out of curiosity I logged into a desktop on the machine containing the /home just to see if it had any adverse effect on app settings, desktop configuration etc, the only thing I’ve found is that I’m using the Search and Launch desktop layout since installing 11.4, on 11.3 using the layout I can’t get any right-click menus on the desktop itself, meaning I can’t do stuff like change the wallpaper, add widgets etc

So that little issue aside, it wouldn’t after all be relevant to a ‘normal’ desktop machine install, installing 11.4 using the same /home partition you were in 11.3 should be pretty flawless & seamless

(Incidentally I tried the Search and Launch layout on two other machines using local /homes still running 11.3 and they both had the same right-click issue, and cos you can’t right-click … darned if I know how to change it back!)

I’ve always prefered a ‘fresh install’ over an upgrade and I don’t think I’m alone in that, and more often than not I use a network install disk so as to be starting out with the latest versions of things from the word go, if you use anything else you end up downloading the same stuff as updates once the installion’ finishes as updates anyway … so you wait for it all to install, then wait for it to download as updates then install all over again

But the real beauty of a network install is you’re more likely to end up with less stuff you’ve no use for and never use, though on the downside it does mean a little more work afterwards in terms of installing things like libraries, kernel headers, apps you always use etc, if that stuff puts you off I’d go with a dvd install

I’ve just previewed that and not sure which I’ve been the most, helpful or confusing, so to sum up …

Personally I would do a fresh install keeping your original /home, just mount it without formatting during the partition setup part, use either ‘edit’ or ‘create partition setup’, I always use create, and everything should work fine for you

#8

On 2011-04-14 01:06, Wrath5000 wrote:

> Or if you have the hardware, you can install Virtualbox and mess around
> with 11.4 while keeping your 11.3 in tact. It’s also easy to make and
> restore from snapshots if something goes terribly wrong.

Absolutely.
Although you still need to test the real thing for a hardware test.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)

#9

OK. After reading all the responses, I think I’m going to give the upgrade a shot – but I’m going to wait until Monday. Don’t want to go into the weekend with a bunch of problems to fix. I will report back in this thread my results.

I think the best way to backup my current system would just be create a .tar of everything and put it aside. then if 11.4 blows everything up, I can just untar that file and be back where I started.

#10

I just did the 11.3 to 11.4 upgrade a couple days ago. It went quite smoothly but it did change my bootsplash screen to some hideous Suse bootsplash. It was easy enough to switch back to my nice one though. For some reason it deleted my VirtualBox app. So I downloaded the latest RPM from virtualbox.org and reinstalled it, all of my virtual disks were still there so it didn’t hurt too bad. Everything else appears to be ok but I’ve only got about 4 hours of use with 11.4. On the plus side, I did gain 2 gigs of disk space. If anything breaks I’ll let you know.

#11

About my upgrade, I should have mentioned I installed the 32 bit version and use KDE and I installed on a Pentium Dual Core laptop with 2 gigs of memory.

#12

Glad things have gone smoothly for you, Mikislate.

#13

Looks like a mixed bag with openSUSE 11.4. I first tried the upgrade from 11.3 to 11.4 and discovered a number of things didn’t work right. I asked for opinions on this forum and several responses were to do a new install, which I did. The new install wiped out my /home directory even though I was careful to insure it wouldn’t be formatted. Then, although 11.4 correctly recognized my printer and scanner (two different pieces of hardware) I couldn’t scan or print and found none of the drivers in 11.4 worked. Finally, I gave up in frustration and reinstalled 11.3, and now I can scan and print again. Until 11.4, I’ve been extremely pleased with the way openSUSE ran on my computer.

Today I received an upgrade notice for 11.3 which wanted to replace OpenOffice with LibreOffice. The installation seemed to go OK, but when I try to open a LibreOffice app, I get an error message: .libreoffice/3-suse/user/uno_packages/cache/uno_packages.db] Berkeley Db error (0): Db::open: Invalid argument. It’s odd, because if I log in as “root”, LibreOffice works. Looks like I’m going to have to uninstall and reinstall it.

Hope you learn from all the posts here. :slight_smile:

#14

No problem with that LibreOffice update here on 11.3 x86_64. Mind you I’ve only opened one .xlsx spreadsheet so far. But I did it from the CLI so I would have seen any error messages.

#15

On 2011-04-16 05:36, fritzk9 wrote:

>. The new install wiped out my /home directory
> even though I was careful to insure it wouldn’t be formatted.

Surely not.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)

#16

On 04/16/2011 05:36 AM, fritzk9 wrote:
>
> The new install wiped out my /home directory
> even though I was careful to insure it wouldn’t be formatted.

unbelievable…

>
> It’s odd, because if I log in as “root”, LibreOffice works.

you should never log into KDE/Gnome/XFCE or any other *nix-like system’s
graphical user interface desktop environment as root…

doing so 1) opens you up to several different security problems if you
(for example) browse the net, 2) too many too easy ways to damage your
system no matter how careful your actions (for example: well documented
cases of unintended change of ownership of ~/.ICEauthority and
~/.Xauthority from user to root sometimes occurs), 3) anyway logging
into KDE/etc as root is never required to do any and all
administrative duties, 4) and, not even logging in as root just to see
if it works as root is useful, because the “yes” or “no” learned is
almost always totally useless in finding the problem giving the
symptoms. however, logging in as root to learn the yes/no could the
cause of the next adverse symptom encountered.

so, always log in as yourself, and “become root” by using a root powered
application (like YaST, File Manager Superuser Mode) or using “su -”,
sudo, kdesu, or gnomesu in a terminal to launch whatever tool is needed
(like Kwrite to edit a config file)…read more on all that here:

http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Login_as_root
http://tinyurl.com/ydbwssh
http://tinyurl.com/4nsaqst
http://tinyurl.com/6ry6yd

additionally: after logging into KDE/Gnome/etc as root, if you
experience problems (for example, with uncommanded file ownership and
permissions changes) and if you can provide us with details of what you
were doing while you were logged in as root, that would help us identify
if there’s a bug that needs to be fixed…thanks for your help…

–
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
[NNTP via openSUSE 11.3 + KDE4.5.5 + Thunderbird3.1.8]
Q: Why do you upgrade?
A: Because the Gecko is always greener on the other side!
So said k428 in http://is.gd/Pwc3xq

#17

OK. I upgraded from 11.3 to 11.4 this morning and I was pleasantly surprised that it went quite smoothly with a minimum of issues.

I use the GNOME desktop and the desktop upgraded fine. I’ve got several non-OS apps installed and only had a problem with a few.

DOSBOX worked fine
GoogleEArth worked fine
My Groupwise email client was OK
OpenOffice automatically upgrade to LibraOffice – I was worried about that one but it seems to have been perfect
Virtualbox did not work initially but as soon as I applied the first round of patches from the online repositories, VBox started working.
UltraEdit (an awesome text editor) stopped working and there is no 11.4 version available for it so I’ll have to wait on it.
VLC video player also stopped working but I installed the new 11.4 version with no problems.

A few other things I noticed, the start menu’s are all different and instead of being nested, each category (games, graphics, internet, etc) have no subcategories – everything is in the root of each category.

They also still haven’t fixed the issue where CIFS mounts listed in /etc/fstab will not auto-mount on bootup.

But other than that, I would call the 11.4 upgrade a smashing success!

#18

Well, found the first problem from my upgrade yesterday. Going from 11.3 to 11.4 broke my wireless. When I go into network settings, I see my wireless settings and all the correct information is in there (mac, ssid, password, etc) and the “automatically connect” box is checked but it never tries to connect.

I’m assuming either the wireless driver was clobbered or there is a service that was not restarted. Any thoughts?

#19

On 2011-04-19 15:06, jgosney wrote:
>
> Well, found the first problem from my upgrade yesterday. Going from
> 11.3 to 11.4 broke my wireless. When I go into network settings, I see
> my wireless settings and all the correct information is in there (mac,
> ssid, password, etc) and the “automatically connect” box is checked but
> it never tries to connect.
>
> I’m assuming either the wireless driver was clobbered or there is a
> service that was not restarted. Any thoughts?

rcnetwork restart

?

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)

#20

On 04/19/2011 03:06 PM, jgosney wrote:
>
> Any thoughts?

just a wild guess: your wireless hardware runs into a problem with
11.4’s newer kernel and has to have some manual dickering with the
driver…start with the three stickies at the top of the wireless forum…

–
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
[openSUSE 11.3 + KDE4.5.5 + Thunderbird3.1.8 via NNTP]
A Penguin Being Tickled - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GILA0rrR6w