I have a seperate home partition and am planning on doing a clean install of 12.3 over my /root partition. Are there any major pitfalls I might not have thought of? I have never done this before and am just wondering. According to the openSUSE SDB this should be no problem. Then again on another site they have you doing the zypper dup route.
I did zypper dup in the past and it does work well. But sometimes it just doesn’t work when there are major differences in architecture between two openSUSE versions like from gnome2.x to gnome 3.x ,init to systemd ,/usr merge etc…Over the years the non /home/* folder collect lot of junk libraries left over from previous installations. very old log files lie around eating into useful space.
Always better to do a fresh install by retaining home.
On 2013-03-13 00:06, anika200 wrote:
>
> I have a seperate home partition and am planning on doing a clean
> install of 12.3 over my /root partition. Are there any major pitfalls I
> might not have thought of? I have never done this before and am just
> wondering. According to the ‘openSUSE SDB’
> (https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:How_to_migrate_to_a_new_openSUSE_version)
> this should be no problem. Then again on another site they have you
> doing the zypper dup route.
System upgrade procedures:
Online upgrade
method
Offline upgrade
method
Chapter 16. Upgrading the System and System Changes
Then you can install fresh, formatting the root partition and keeping
home. Your personal files and configs are kept, but system configs are lost.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4, with Evergreen, x86_64 “Celadon” (Minas Tirith))
That’s what I normally do.
I sometimes keep a small file “Customize.log” where I record any minor configuration changes that I make, as I will have to redo those after the clean install.
I have never run into problems updating that way.
This time I did use “zypper dup” to go from 12.3 RC2 to 12.3 final on one box. That was so I could have the final version a day or two early. I’ll be doing the clean install on my other boxes.
I hope I am correct that you mean your root file system, which is mounted at /.
/root is a different directory. You can of course mount a file system at /root, but from the logics of system management that is not very usefull (there is only 1 Mbytes in there) and it would completely nullify the reason why /root (the home directory of the user root) is there and not e.g. inside /home.
With what media method will you download and install from?
I usually install 2 to 3 different versions per release, such as main, test and or Tumbleweed (always been a zypper dup from standard install). Over the last few years a mixture. With zypper dup, all of those worked well. I first disable any additional repos including packman, mainly to experience the default installation before adding them back and updating. The clean installs, just as good, more recently from liveCD, and 12.2 was very smooth here.
I multiboot including W7, not with any seperate /home partitions, but with a shared data partition mounted into each /home. The main consideration there is editing the installers’ partitioning proposal and boot loader section, where placing Grub is a “must get it right”, and the options can be confusing for the inexperienced. For that, the installer has been reliable through the 12.x series…
On 2013-03-13 03:36, vazhavandan wrote:
> I did zypper dup in the past and it does work well. But sometimes it
> just doesn’t work when there are major differences in architecture
> between two openSUSE versions like from gnome2.x to gnome 3.x ,init to
> systemd ,/usr merge etc…Over the years the non /home/* folder collect
> lot of junk libraries left over from previous installations.
In this respect the offline upgrade method behaves better.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4, with Evergreen, x86_64 “Celadon” (Minas Tirith))
One thing i forgot to mention. zypper dup requires reliable internet :-)We should probably run ping for 5 mins and check whether any packets are lost etc… I think the default for dup is now “in-advance”. Much better this way as in past it was simultaneous download and install and screen would suddenly turn black and so on
Older versions of zypper downloaded, uninstalled and installed concurrently. Recent versions download everything to /var/zypp/cache before attempting the upgrade. This significantly reduces the at-risk window.
Update,
I went with the clean install which formatted / and left /home alone and I all worked out great so far (desktop computer).
There were a couple of things that would probably be confusing to someone new, including me, but It worked out. I want to jot down a couple things here but I think these are common and have been answered in the forums before.
- When booting the usb-DVD I hit the hot key (motherboard option) to select the usb boot device and to my surprise I was presented with an option to boot either UEFI openSUSE or just openSUSE.
Looking at my monitor and positioned directly above the boot drive selection I see a Giant Logo that reads "UEFI Bringing You the Future Today". The motherboard manufacture must think this is a great thing indeed and who am I to argue with that.
Well obviously I would want the future today and openSUSE seemed to be offering me this option as well, wow great. I went for the UEFI option and the installer whizzed along and then I got to the Partition screen and there was a bunch of Red, Red listings, hmmmm.
Well anyway I still want the future today so I eliminate all the red things and give UEFI its Fat /boot/efi partition and click on accept.
The installer seemed happy for a second and then It pops out this little message about no GPT disks and would I want to change them in order to proceed, well this is the future and of course I want to proceed. So I click the ok button to proceed and then another warning pops up about wiping out some data or something, I was trying to answer a phone call at this point (work yeahhh) and just clicked the OK, Accept button so I could get on with this call and the openSUSE install and things went …Straight down the tubes… Bye Bye /home and /home/music and /home/pictures and /home/documents/my company stuff…
Ok, now that we are all done laughing it all worked out ok and everything is back to normal, Thank you triple backup plan I had.
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My network connection was not automatically activated and I had to go into Yast2 and configure everything. I wonder if this is because of the copy back of /home from backup???
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I had to go into kmix and select my audio channel to get music to work. I guess this is because I have internal sound, hdmi sound, and usb sound.
Couple suggestions for the future.
- maybe the installer could tell you way ahead of time that all your disks are msdos and you can not really boot uefi without wiping out your data.
- If the computer can not find an internet connection maybe there should be some clue ( pop up a window about where to configure network maybe) before you start up Firefox and wait for 2 minutes.