Hi,
I have had OpenSUSE installed on the same machine since at least 11.2 IIRC. I have done an in-place upgrade for each subsequent release through 12.1 (no betas or RCs). I have had various problems with upgrades but eventually managed to solve anything that I noticed as sub-functional. The recent 12.1 upgrade switch to systemd broke Apache2, which was highly annoying, but I managed to (with help on the forums) fix that too.
Can someone with more in-depth knowledge of the inner workings of OpenSUSE, including past versions, answer: how much is too much? When am I going to be bogging my system down with useless, unused, or obsolete packages? As an example, my root partition is currently over 20GB, up from probably less than 10GB when I first formatted. I had to resize my partitions to make room because it was capped at 20, and with 5 other partitions on the same drive, that took a looooong time!
Being able to indefinitely perform in-place distro upgrades is something of a matter of pride, but in practicality, what are advantages/disadvantages to retaining the same installation? Obviously I’d like to not have to reinstall all my programs, but I’d also like to not keep bloatware I’ve never used.
On 01/11/2012 12:06 PM, sp3wn wrote:
> Being able to indefinitely perform in-place distro upgrades is
> something of a matter of pride, but in practicality
in practicality, and a different view from Carlos (whom i respect as
i’ve only been doing SUSE since about 9.2 or so, RH, Fedora, Mandrake
and others before)…
my answer (from personal experience, and that of reading the snakes that
arise here after uncountable “upgrade” attempts) is that while it takes
a little more time on install day but it eliminates HOURS and HOURS of
head scratching and patching if one moves from one version to another by
format/install of all partitions and then install applications and join
in the saved off data…
but, it should be noted that imo, most of the problems we see here come
from improperly executed upgrades…there are community approved means
to do an upgrade here: http://tinyurl.com/35p966c and http://tinyurl.com/6kvoflv but most folks with problems afterwards make
up their own path to misery…
On 01/12/2012 06:46 AM, JohnVV wrote:
>
> I am a bit in the middle of the road
> For minor version . . . major version upgrades
but in openSUSE there is no such thing as either minor or major versions…
each version comes out at a date certain (every eight months) and while
‘they’ strive to find something “new” to beat the release drum about,
there is no longer any thing like a MAJOR change-up super-duper midnight
lines of eager spenders version, and then three ho-hum minor versions . . .
> major version upgrades - do a clean install .Way too many things change
> Even in opensuse as apposed to ,say,fedora .
What is for you a major or a minor version upgrade? Are you referring to
the numbers to right or left of the dot in the version number? Then update
yourself, there is no such thing as a major version. By “internal law”,
numbers are x.1, x.2, x.3 and back to y.1, regardless of what changes inside.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
Personally, I always recommend doing a clean install, minus /home. Reason being that each upgrade has the potential to break your system. If it doesn’t, well and good, but if it does break your system, now you either spend hours troubleshooting or youbdk a clean install anyway. Save yoursekf the hassel, do a clean install.
On 2012-01-15 04:16, konthra7 wrote:
>
> Personally, I always recommend doing a clean install, minus /home.
> Reason being that each upgrade has the potential to break your system.
> If it doesn’t, well and good, but if it does break your system, now you
> either spend hours troubleshooting or youbdk a clean install anyway.
> Save yoursekf the hassel, do a clean install.
As always, it depends. If, for example, you have an mysql database, a fresh
install will destroy it. Same for a web server, smtp sever, etc. In those
cases a fresh install is a hassle to avoid.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
As always, it depends. If, for example, you have an mysql database, a fresh
install will destroy it. Same for a web server, smtp sever, etc. In those
cases a fresh install is a hassle to avoid.
You can avoid that problem by supply one or more partitions and direct the databases to them. and backup configuration files. Data should never be mixed in to the OS files.
On 2012-01-16 04:26, gogalthorp wrote:
>
>> As always, it depends. If, for example, you have an mysql database, a fresh
>> install will destroy it. Same for a web server, smtp sever, etc. In those
>> cases a fresh install is a hassle to avoid.
>>
>
> You can avoid that problem by supply one or more partitions and direct
> the databases to them. and backup configuration files. Data should never
> be mixed in to the OS files.
It is not only data, but also configuration files in /etc, lots of them.
And no, making a backup of all that and restoring it later is worse. In my
case it saves my weeks of work by upgrading.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)