A small question, I’ve got the official DVD SUSE 11.0 RC in my possesion, now I’ve got SUSE 10.3 as my OS with the last version of KDE3.5 and all files for KDE 4.0 (stable). Is it a good idea to upgrade to SUSE 11.0 and if so, is this possible (I think so), but does upgrading also mean that I won’t loose my personal documents, pictures, my favourite sites (because of Firefox 3), my email addresses and so on and what about the programs I installed?
Thanks for any reply.
If you upgrade, anything in /home will remain unchanged except a few hidden files related to applications.
Any programs you have installed will be updated but in some cases you may lose changes to settings in, for example, /etc which you have made.
I would never upgrade without backing up /home and any other files I have edited which might be overwritten when a new version of a program is installed.
Peerlaan,
It depends what you mean “is it a good idea to upgrade?” If you mean is it better than staying with 10.3, there are a whole lot of variables and personal preferences involved that few can answer other than you. Some has to do with your hardware. Check bugzilla for some of your key hardware to make sure there are no problems unfixed in the beta testing phase (my laptop has numerous unfixed bugs that make going to 11.0 unworkable for a machine that is my daily work computer). Some has to do with which desktop environment you want to try. You can test drive KDE4 & Gnome using the live CDs to see how you like things. KDE 3.5.9 is almost exactly what you had if you chose KDE in 10.3. You can always install 11.0 along side 10.3 if you have the space. Just create a separate partition for 11.0. If you don’t like it, you can re-install the 10.3 boot loader and nuke the 11.0 partition. Many of us did something like this when we beta tested 11.0.
If you mean is it better to upgrade vs. do a clean install, you’ll get two schools of thought. The former preserves many of your settings and your personal files (although, of course you should back up your /home partition/directory to be safe), but this also has the potential for problems. The clean install has the advantage of not introducing additional problems from mixing config files and the like, but you will have some more work to get your personal files back in place. I generally go the clean install route and suffer through a bit more tweaking. If you opt for KDE4, you’ll likely have a lot of tweaking to do anyway, so the additional work for a clean install may be small. If you opt for KDE3, the upgrade should be minor and the clean install will be more tweaking.
So, a lot depends on your personal preferences, tolerances, how much potential downtime you can afford right now if you have troubles to iron out, etc.
Good luck which ever route you take!
Many thanks john_hudson and Dmoor316. I succeeded, it was great, no problems at all, I only had to re-install several programs, but the personal documents, the favorites, e-mail addresses and so on were saved, so it was great.
But I think that there are still some bugs, e.g. I cannot save any message from Thunderbird to another file and the biggest one (no problems before with SUSE 10.1 and 10.3), in spite of the fact that my graphic card has been recognized and configured properly my screen settings 1280x1024 60hz are seen when rebooting as 1600x1024 60hz RGB, crazy, although Sax2 has configured it well. I cannot see any problem in /etc/x11/xorg.conf anyway. I thinks some bugs still, or am I incorrect?
Thanks anyway for your advices about SUSE 11.0.