Upgrading SuSE 10.0 to 11.0?

gymnart · November 27, 2008, 7:52pm

Right now, I have SuSE 10.0 and it works fine, does all that I need it to do with multimedia and all (I can pop in any movie DVD and watch it) and I am very satisfied with it.

I know that one day, I will have to upgrade to 11.0 or higher (Flash 10 does not support SuSE 10.0 and when most media laden websites eventually code their stuff in Flash 10 then the internet will not be so functional for me anymore.)

Question: How do I upgrade from 10.0 without losing all my stuff in my /home folder? Is there a “howto” wiki (written for total n00bs) somewhere that I did not find yet?

My /home folder is not in a separate partition. Also, I have some things that were installed from source and I would not want to have them ruined.

My biggest fear is: What if I don’t like the upgrade? Will I be able to get my SuSE 10.0 back? I see that there are no more repositories to resolve dependency issues if I have to re-install some of my software.

What if Novell drops support for some of my hardware?

This part has to do with KDE 4.1:
I have an NVidia GeForce 5200 graphics card and I’ve read that in KDE 4.1 that there is now a problem with the NVidia driver. 3D stuff is very important to my 10 year old to play games (Super Tux Racer, Extreme Tux Racer, etc) and for me to make 3D models (in Art Of Illusion and use them in SweetHome3D).

I just don’t want stuff to be broken.

ken_yap · November 27, 2008, 9:02pm

There will be pain upgrading. If you don’t want disruption, get another disk and install 11.0 (with a separate /home) on that and transfer your stuff over and work on it until you get things working.

gymnart · November 28, 2008, 5:05am

If I do that, it would then be a dual boot, right? Would SuSE 11.0 see that I have 10.0 on the other drive and set itself up to dual boot?

ken_yap · November 28, 2008, 5:46am

Probably but there are details you have to look after, like which GRUB you will use and if so where the GRUB is loaded, MBR or partition BR. Also remember that 11.0 uses ext2/3 with inode size of 256 by default. So either use the 11.0 GRUB, or specify that inode size is 128 when installing 11.0.