Upgrade question

English Hardware
#1

Hello. I was not sure where to put this question so since I have installed 11.4 on a laptop, I’ll pose it here. I’m new to Suse and Linux in general.I do have Opensuse running fully and very satisfactorily on a T410 with XP running in a virtual box when office2007 is required.That’s so neat! I didn’t know that could be done. lol Anyhow,I was wondering whether I will need to reformat upon the next release of Suse or are full upgrades relatively stable and reliable? Will it be necessary to upgrade at all when a new veriosn comes out for security/function etc? Sorry if this is very general. Tremendous OS by the way.I’m very,very impressed.

Thank you

#2

Hello. I was not sure where to put this question so since I have installed 11.4 on a laptop, I’ll pose it here. I’m new to Suse and Linux in general.I do have Opensuse running fully and very satisfactorily on a T410 with XP running in a virtual box when office2007 is required.That’s so neat! I didn’t know that could be done. lol Anyhow,I was wondering whether I will need to reformat upon the next release of Suse or are full upgrades relatively stable and reliable? Will it be necessary to upgrade at all when a new veriosn comes out for security/function etc? Sorry if this is very general. Tremendous OS by the way.I’m very,very impressed.

Thank you
I am happy to hear you got everything working with openSUSE 11.4. Doing an upgrade from from openSUSE 11.4 to 11.5 or what ever it may be called should be doable in the future. I normally would pop into the openSUSE forum and see whats going on and if any issues have been noted about doing an upgrade. That being said, did you create a separate /home hard disk partition? If you did, you normally have the option to do a clean install, but without formatting the /home partition. This leaves all of your settings usable with the new openSUSE version. You do need to reload all of your old applications, but you just don’t have any of the issues that can occur when doing an upgrade. Specifically, having some older apps still installed side by side with newer ones. This can cause odd issues sometimes, though surely not all of the time at all. Just let us know if you need any advise or help with your new version of openSUSE 11.4 and good luck.

Thank You,

#3

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs 288G 24G 250G 9% /
devtmpfs 1.9G 244K 1.9G 1% /dev
tmpfs 1.9G 124K 1.9G 1% /dev/shm
devpts 0 0 0 - /dev/pts
/dev/sda2 288G 24G 250G 9% /
proc 0 0 0 - /proc
sysfs 0 0 0 - /sys
debugfs 0 0 0 - /sys/kernel/debug
securityfs 0 0 0 - /sys/kernel/security
gvfs-fuse-daemon 0 0 0 - /home/jhan/.gvfs
fusectl 0 0 0 - /sys/fs/fuse/connections

No home partition :frowning: … I did a swap plus one big “/” partition so maybe in eight months or so I will redo with a home partition if I need to.Thank you for that information!

#4

However, you should consider reformatting if there is a better filesystem available for your needs. After upgrading to 11.3 I noticed a huge improvement in disk r/w speeds when I reformatted home from ext3 to ext4. You can preserve your home settings and data simply by copying its contents to a temporary location, format your /home partition with any livecd disk tool (pmagic, for example) and copy the data back on. And then install oS.