Upgrade installation

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

HI, lets give you a short summary of what I’ve been through recently.

I was looking for a way to run City of Heroes/Villains on linux… i couldn’t find a way to do it. not on my current distro.

I thought about upgrading to the newest SuSE, but… I don;t want to have to back-up all my GB’s of filesand reformat the hardrive…

is there some way upgrade to the newest SuSE distro from SuSE 10.0 without having to format my files?

also can someone test if the newest windows emulators can run City-of-heroes/villains? (I’ll send a free invite email)

thanks. (is willing to buy the newest distro)

btw I have just switched back to linux after a screen freezing virus knocked out my windows harddrive

#2

You can do a fresh install (upgrading from 10.0 to 11.3 is very much NOT recommended). Just in the installer be very sure that you specify NOT to format the partition that contains your home partition but just mount it as /home. Note if you maintain SQL database or ther data that may reside on root you may want to tell us so that someone can tell you how to proceed.

Now that said, it is very foolish not to backup since doing an install is tricky business and many many things might go wrong. Like maybe you press the wrong button or maybe the power goes off in the middle or …

#3

On 2010-08-17 23:06, cliff-s wrote:

…

> I thought about upgrading to the newest SuSE, but… I don;t want to
> have to back-up all my GB’s of filesand reformat the hardrive…

But you have to. Backup, I mean. It is a must do part of any upgrade or install procedure. You can
leave home and data partitions out of the installation process, but there is always a danger.

> is there some way upgrade to the newest SuSE distro from SuSE 10.0
> without having to format my files?

Upgrade via DVD might work. Might.
It is a long jump. You need some experience.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” GM (Elessar))

#4

thing is I’ve got most of my files under /usr cause Imade the home partition really small… my dad suggested that… he said if you make the home and boot partitions really small there wont be room for viruses… (left me with sod-all space to save my files… so I moved it all to usr cause thats where the space was)

I also ahve lots of programs installed that were a real problem to install, DVD video reading codecs and, things like that… I’m really scared to upgrade… I have a bad feeling I might loose something and not be able to replace it…

backing up all my files on CD-RW’s will take a while…

ok, I’ve decided I’m gonna try the back-up and format and install the newest SuSE fresh, but I want to know if City of Heroes will run on it via windows emulation City of Heroes | NCsoft will this run in the newest wine or crossover office? and I don’t just mean install I mean actually run in game play.

#5

On 2010-08-18 04:36, cliff-s wrote:
>
> thing is I’ve got most of my files under /usr cause Imade the home
> partition really small… my dad suggested that… he said if you make the
> home and boot partitions really small there wont be room for viruses…

I think he was pulling your leg >:-)

(I have never seen a virus in my linuxes. I have to go hunting for them on purpose and save them
somewhere, so that I can feed the antivirus with something. They are starving from boredom.)

Viruses filling up space, in Linux? Oh, common!

> (left me with sod-all space to save my files… so I moved it all to usr
> cause thats where the space was)

Argh. :frowning:

You are certainly going to lose everything in /usr or /opt, as they have to be formatted for a new
install. On an upgrade, files are preserved if they don’t belong to an rpm. Of course, an upgrade
means some work, and in your case, more, with uncertain result. Me, I would try (with a backup ready).

> I also ahve lots of programs installed that were a real problem to
> install, DVD video reading codecs and, things like that… I’m really
> scared to upgrade… I have a bad feeling I might loose something and not
> be able to replace it…

Indeed.

> backing up all my files on CD-RW’s will take a while…

I was thinking of a big, spare external disk via usb.

> ok, I’ve decided I’m gonna try the back-up and format and install the
> newest SuSE fresh, but I want to know if City of Heroes will run on it
> via windows emulation ‘City of Heroes | NCsoft’

I can not say.

My usual advice is to install to a fresh, spare partition, and test whatever you need to run in the
new system version

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” GM (Elessar))

#6

he said if you make the home and boot partitions really small there wont be room for viruses…

It is hard to point out in how many ways this is very wrong. First: Linux-viruses hardly even exist and are (for now) not a threat for home-desktop users at all. There’s no need to even waste a thought on that (honestly). Second: if they were a threat, minimizing partition-space would not help anyway, since a virus often will need less than a MB of space. Third: using /usr as a substitute to store whatever files is just the worst idea ever; /usr contains executables, libraries and the like and is in no way meant to be trashed with data. Also to have access to /usr you need to be root, meaning that you obviously are always logged in as root - something which security-wise comes pretty close to a hacked system.

To make it short: borrow an external hard drive from a friend, backup all your data (such as movies, music etc. but also stuff like EMails, anything personal you want to keep), then install a current SuSE-version from scratch. Note that no matter if reinstall or upgrade, you will have to set up certain things (like multimedia support) anyway - besides, upgrading from 10.0 to a current version is pretty close to impossible (and please don’t get to comfortable with the idea of simply keeping 10.0, your system is a old, insecure and a mess and needs to be rebuild, seriously).

Learn to control your system, that’s pretty much the point with Linux.

City of Heroes does not run too well with wine as it seems, see →here.

#7

putting anything but programs installed by root but given run access to regular users in /usr is a big NO-NO!! Back-up what you can as others have suggested and start using correct foreplanning. /home/<user>/ is the place for user settings and All data it is also usually the largest partition of the system as a system may have many <user> private sub-folders. Any virus you may find or download will undoubtedly be infected windows based files which while they can be stored in the home/<user> area will do nothing currently under Linux. While such files can store into your home folder, they can’t be run from there without you specifically telling Linux to do so. And even if you do something as stupid as that, Linux is not windows so the chance of it doing anything is 0. Where you may have concern is if you plan to send the file from Linux to a Windows friend or to a windows partition where it can run.