I’m a fairly new OpenSUSE user. I installed 11.3 about a week after it’s release. I had no idea an update would come this soon. I, probably like many of you, have quite a bit of software installed, from software development to multimedia creation. I didn’t plan on upgrading to 11.4, but after reading the newest stuff on here I think I want to. What’s the easiest way to upgrade?
Is there some sort of list in YaST of all the packages I have installed that didn’t come installed? I plan on backing up my home directory (and any other you suggest). This might be the time to weed down on everything I have installed.
I use YaST for most of the stuff I install, but there’s quite a bit I compile myself to install. I’m wondering if there’s a good way to keep track of that stuff in YaST and if there are newer versions of it. Also, I’m assuming I’ll be compiling a lot of stuff when I upgrade because there won’t be a lot of it precompiled for 11.4, right?
Anything else I should know? I read the New User General Install sticky but I still wanted to ask.
Just to point out that you don’t have to upgrade if you are happy with 11.3. There will be enough time to upgrade to 11.5 or 12.0 or whatever they call it before 11.3 goes out of support.
It could be as easy as choosing the upgrade option on the DVD. Official packages that are still supported in 11.4 will be noticed and upgraded. Software that you compiled yourself will be untouched. They will probably work as is, but it depends. Hopefully you put them in /usr/local or somewhere like that.
Is using the “Upgrade” feature a good idea? That was never a good idea when I used Windows. I thought this could be a clean up time, restart and only use what I really need. Although I’d like to keep a lot of my settings. I’m thinking about upgrading because I use KDE and it seems like there’s some new cool stuff for that. I was wondering if YaST had some sort of export spreadsheet of installed packages feature so I could compare with a new install to see what I’d need.
I used to be sceptical about SUSE upgrades because the developers were not as experienced in the online upgrade game as other distros but my last upgrade from 11.2 to 11.3 was pretty painless so I think they have moved up the learning curve. I used to sometimes install from fresh and sometimes upgrade depending on whether it was a new machine/disk. Both methods had their drawbacks.
On 2011-03-04 03:06, cameronleger wrote:
>
> Is using the “Upgrade” feature a good idea?
For me, it is.
> I was wondering if YaST had
> some sort of export spreadsheet of installed packages feature so I could
> compare with a new install to see what I’d need.
You can certainly generate a text file with the list of installed packages.
Or a comma separated list of values (.csv), that you can import in OO or
excel - but you have to define yourself the exact format to write to the
last comma detail. See man rpm, search for format strings for the query
command.
Or, tell yast to write an xml file, that can be used with autoyast to
install a similar system.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
On 2011-03-04 03:36, ken yap wrote:
>
> I used to be sceptical about SUSE upgrades because the developers were
> not as experienced in the online upgrade game as other distros but my
I have been doing upgrades with SUSE since 1998. How come they are not
experienced in upgrades?
What they haven’t till recently are “live” upgrades.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
I usually do a fresh install
Having a backup of all my data and settings.
This always works for me.
Upgrade is possible and does usually work, as has been outlined. Much can depend on your install now and if you built on it with upgrade in mind. You should know, it can be be a few weeks or so before the Packman packages have all the same packages available for 11.4 as they have for 11.3 but currently that’s a confusing subject because of all the changes taking place there. Also, if you have added too many repos form OBS, this can complicate an upgrade…
You will also find some users are very opinionated about what you can/can’t do!
–
DenverD
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
[NNTP posted w/openSUSE 11.3, KDE4.5.5, Thunderbird3.0.11, nVidia
173.14.28 3D, Athlon 64 3000+]
“It is far easier to read, understand and follow the instructions than
to undo the problems caused by not.” DD 23 Jan 11
On 2011-03-04 11:43, DenverD wrote:
> On 03/03/2011 11:06 PM, cameronleger wrote:
>>
>> Anything else I should know?
>
> if you decide to upgrade please use the correct procedure, here:
>
> http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:System_upgrade
–
DenverD
CAVEAT: http://is.gd/bpoMD
[NNTP posted w/openSUSE 11.3, KDE4.5.5, Thunderbird3.0.11, nVidia
173.14.28 3D, Athlon 64 3000+]
“It is far easier to read, understand and follow the instructions than
to undo the problems caused by not.” DD 23 Jan 11
Thanks for all the links guys. I think I will copy my entire OpenSUSE partition to a safe place, reformat, and install clean. That way, I can go back and get necessary changes if need be. Any suggestions for backing up my entire OpenSUSE partition? I don’t have a complicated filesystem going on, just a partition for Windows, OpenSUSE, boot, and swap.
Your data in openSUSE has nothing to do with windows, /boot or swap
Usually it’s simple enough to copy the data you want to a safe place, your windows partition would be OK, if it has the space, create a folder in the C and copy your files over.
Wouldn’t copying the drive to a place on the NTFS drive mess up the permissions or anything else? Would you copy them as root to the mounted NTFS in OpenSUSE or use a Windows program to access the OpenSUSE partition and copy them over?
On 2011-03-05 20:36, cameronleger wrote:
>
> Wouldn’t copying the drive to a place on the NTFS drive mess up the
> permissions or anything else?
Yes, indeed. Permission info would be lost. If what you are saving is your
personal files, it doesn’t matter much. However, there are other methods.
You can archive and compress your files into a .tgz archive, and save this
archive anywhere you like. The tar program will save and restore all those
attributes.
(I use ‘mc’ for this task)
Another method is using mtools: one of the utilities can create a script
that would recreate the attributes… - no, I’m wrong, sorry. It recreates
the msdos attributes of msdos files stored into a linux filesystem, the
other way round.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
@robin_listas is correct
For some crazy reason I assumed you were just meaning you personal files in /home/username
Now I re-read your comments, I see you might mean more than that.
I just moved from 11.3 to 11.4, but I only backup personal stuff and some hidden ~/.
I asked because I also wanted to store everything just in case I’d want to go back. However, I have enough space that I could trim some off some other drives, install 11.4 on a different partition, and then keep the old one intact. In that case, if all goes well, I’d get rid of the 11.3 partition and extend all my other partitions back.
