I have numerous drives and mount points if I do a upgrade from 11.3 to 11.4 rather than a full install will the installer use my old fstab or will I have to create all new mount points?
If you do an upgrade it should. If you do a new install (ie format root) then no I don’t believe so
Unfortunately I don’t have a machine I can test this on so I have to get it right the first time. It’s my daily use machine and I am at it 18+ hours a day. 11.3 runs out of life in November and I think 12.X will be a bigger change than I am ready for.
I agree with @gogalthorp, the upgrade (assuming you use zypper dup to do it) should preserve your additional mount points in fstab. I don’t think the normal installer (used in a full/clean install) is involved. However, you should at least backup the old fstab so you can copy the mounts back to [new] fstab if we are wrong. 
Yea. I am thinking of perhaps cloning my current master drive which has / and /home on it with a pmagic CD but believe that grub is in the MBR and I have not the slightest clue how to deal with that. I have have never had any success booting from a drive with grub in some other location. Then I could attempt the an upgrade via zypper. I was hoping the installer would work but I think you are correct it would want to create new partitions at least for / and a completely new fstab. I have so much stuff hanging out there too as in installed stuff from Packman and Google that I’d have to re-install I think. I do have /home backed up via rsync -av /home/flamebait /bu/flamebait (not to original) which is one of the 6 drives in this machine. I am knowing I need to deal with this but generally freaking out over the stuff that makes you nervous when you are unskilled.
I have a general idea of how to do it via zypper dup from the mailing list. You need to delete all your old 11.3 repos and add 11.4 repos in their place then do zypper dup.
On 2011-09-25 03:36, FlameBait wrote:
> I have a general idea of how to do it via zypper dup from the mailing
> list. You need to delete all your old 11.3 repos and add 11.4 repos in
> their place then do zypper dup.
It is documented in the wiki. Read it.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
Which wiki? URL?
In my experience, a new install using either DVD or network CD, will give you an opportunity to import the disk setup from a previous system. It will then suggest a partitioning scheme based on the old fstab entries. You might still have to tweak a little, but it should mostly be copied.
That has worked for me with a fresh install (preserving “/home”). However, when I installed from the KDE live CD, that import choice was not available. Hmm, I think the import was available with 12.1 M5 installed from KDE live CD, so perhaps this will work for live CDs on future releases.
If you want to try that, it happens before you are committed to install, so you could abort out of the install with nothing changed.
Thanks. I haven’t had much luck finding non broken articles on the WIKI in the past and even less luck navigating it. That looks like where i I need to start.
Trying to use YAST as much as I can so I would change all my repos in the accompanying image to point to the 11.4 versions before doing zypper dup?
The zypper WIKI isn’t telling me anything it’s in need of some drastic improvements.
Or do I just do the update directory and the Packman. I have packman versions of a very few files enabled but mostly it’s multi media stuff and related stuff
http://www.slhess.com/pictures/repos11.3sept.jpg
Hi,
as everybody said, upgrading should keep all mount points.
Since I’m a believer in he law of murphy, I always make a copy of fstab before upgrading - if something goes wrong, I just copy it back…
HTH
Lenwolf
Yes it’s always so easy for us GUI users to copy files owned by root 
I can’t even manage to resync files I own to a USB drive since the USB drive are always seemingly controlled by root. I gave up trying long ago. I intend to make a copy of the whole master drive then use it to do the upgrade to.
I still have un-resolved questions in this thread though.
The WIKI on zypper is sparse and didn’t tell me anything. The wiki on updating with zypper has more info but I still don’t know how I am supposed to deal with the repos I have without exact URLS. I have more than just the standard few repos.
I recently upgraded from 11.3 to 11.4 on my old ThinkPad. I chose the network install method, downloading the network installer, burning to CD,… ethernet connection. All went well, leaving my /home directory in tact. I checked to make sure OSS, non-OSS, update, and packman repos’s were correct/enabled, and proceeded to get the multimedia stuff back up and running.
The only precautions I took before starting was to make sure my entire /home directory was backed up (on my external usb hard drive). I’m not using this ThinkPad as my main machine these days, so decided not to bother with any system configs (located in /etc), but this might be sensible for some users. It does pay to know your partition layout, and keep a hard copy available, just in case you need to refer to it at install time. You wouldn’t want to unintentionally overwrite the wrong partition…
Anyway, good luck with your upgrade.
The WIKI on zypper is sparse and didn’t tell me anything. The wiki on updating with zypper has more info but I still don’t know how I am supposed to deal with the repos I have without exact URLS. I have more than just the standard few repos.
The sensible thing to do here is to just have the OSS, non-OSS, and Update repos enabled for the upgrade. Then add the others back in, post-install. This may be as simple as renaming them (ie replacing 11.3 with 11.4). For those that are http browsable, I tend to have a look first with firefox.
Back to the Wiki, so try Package repositories for links to the official repos and to Additional package repositories e.g. for Packman. As @deano says, you can copy the appropriate URL’s from your browser, and of course you can use YaST’s repository management for updating to the 11.4 repos. However as he says, “KEEP IT SIMPLE” for the initial upgrade (zypper dup). Using YaST you can easily disable additional repos, then re-enable them individually after updating to 11.4 URL’s. Test the basic upgraded 11.4 system (Oss, Non-oss, and Update repos only) carefully before enabling additional repos.
On 09/25/2011 03:36 AM, FlameBait wrote:
> I have a general idea of how to do it via zypper dup from the mailing
> list. You need to delete all your old 11.3 repos and add 11.4 repos in
> their place then do zypper dup.
why not follow one of the guides which will give you much more than “a
general idea”!
wiki > http://tinyurl.com/35p966c
doc > http://tinyurl.com/6kvoflv
BOTH urge you to backup your data prior to beginning, and the doc
version says to also backup config files (for example /etc)
–
DD
Caveat
openSUSE®, the “German Automobiles” of operating systems
On 2011-09-25 07:46, FlameBait wrote:
>
> Yes it’s always so easy for us GUI users to copy files owned by root
> I can’t even manage to resync files I own to a USB drive since the USB
> drive are always seemingly controlled by root. I gave up trying long
> ago. I intend to make a copy of the whole master drive then use it to do
> the upgrade to.
Use a terminal owned by root, and midnight commander (mc).
> I still have un-resolved questions in this thread though.
>
> The WIKI on zypper is sparse and didn’t tell me anything. The wiki on
> updating with zypper has more info but I still don’t know how I am
> supposed to deal with the repos I have without exact URLS. I have more
> than just the standard few repos.
Remove them!
You have to 1) disable or remove ALL existing repos, then add repos for the
next version for OSS, NON-OSS, and updates.
This is in the documentation.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
When did that EOL for 11.3 change!
January 15th 2012 which is in 112 days (2 months after release of 12.1)
But thanks for asking the question, as I’m in the preliminary stages of deciding what I want to keep, what can go, and how I want to approach installing 11.4 on my system.
True -
kdesu dolphin
and you’re practically done…
HTH
Lenwolf