Is upgrade to openSuSE12.2 necessary?
 

Can the gurus from this forum please tell me why one should upgrade from 11.4 to 12.1 or 12.2? Apart from the support issue, is it safe to stay at the version you are happy with and are there security drawbacks when support stops with Evergreen as well?

Reason I'm asking is because I have had really nasty experience with version 12.2. After 3 new installations, I have decided to revert back to 11.4. I've been a SuSE user since release 9.0 and have never had problems like what I'm facing now.

To name few of the problems:
Right after nepomuk started (not invoked by myself at allm it just suddenly started up). Right afterwards, MyComputer failed to display disk info, USB drives cannot be mounted, therefore any backup data stored there cannot be accessed. CD or DVDs cannot be read (no optical drive detected)
Firefox, Opera, Gimp cannot start at all. A Knotify crash report window opens up instead. However, it kept crashing on itself as well.
No sound at all although in YaST/Hardware/Sound, the sound card tested ok. All restricted formats were downloaded. Youtube runs but no sounds. DVDs play with no sound either. Audio CDs does not play because "No optical detected"

Address Book exported from 11.4 (LDIF format) imported but does not show at all.
Cannot use KWallet on its own unless its running with KMail.
Cannot start with console login, therefore cannot run nvidia-xconfig

Advice is urgently sought as I would like to install 11.4 while I can still get all updates since its release in 2011.

thanks heaps

According to this page, 11.4 support finishes on 5 Nov (which isn't far away at all) and there are notes on Evergreen attempting to provide ongoing support to 11.1 and 11.2. Evergreen themselves say that they plan to support 11.4, but when they say 'planning' it is unclear how close to reality that plan is (no maintainer is yet named, and will it start immediately, or will there be initial glitches? I am probably being overly cautious, but it will be possible to be clearer when it actually happens).

If using KDE, nepomuk does start by default. If you don't want anything nepomuk does (and many people don't...maybe it will do something really useful one day as part of whatever semantic desktop will be, but currently it only eats memory and does other performance-reducing stuff, imho), turn it off.

Don't know whether that other stuff is in any way related to nepomuk; I suspect not.

Are there any actual error messages that we can look at? Does, eg, dmesg show anything up?

As you are having sound problems, have you followed the sdb? Any outcomes/error messages?

I assume that this is your substantive question: from a security perspective, you have to get security fixes from somewhere and you need to get them in a timely fashion. I don't really have the experience with Evergreen to comment, but you are relying on either Evergreen themselves or building/installing it manually (and keeping on top of what updates are available, when).

Hi Salasi
Thanks so much for the reply. My machine is now being cleaned out completely in order that everything that caused the troubles are totally overwritten by zeros. I can briefly recount what happened over the last 3 installs.

First install was done over version 11.4. As sound & nvidia was already running smoothly, there were no issues there. I messed up the personal contact because the import didn't work, and at that stage I never imagined a clean install by formatting only the root partition would lead to so many troubles. I though it would be a good way of keeping all my other settings while starting anew.
Second install root partition was formatted. Address book still didn't import. Firefox started to crash and never able to start after it was updated to version 16.01. At this stage, sound was still going normal. KNotify kept crashing as well. When I tried to open an image file, Gimp would go thru the motion of starting and then disappeared to nothing. I tried changing icons on desktop (which I have always been able to do) gave me the message that I do not have permission to do so. Nepomuk popped up after I deleted numerous versions of Personal Contact in System Settings/Personal Info. I then discovered that MyComputer didn't display any disk info, USB, CD/DVDs could not be mounted. Printed was not found. KMail's new messages all arrived as read and none of the other setting (different color & bold font, sound notification didn't run. I did follow the SDB opensuse audio troubleshoot and it got the sound going. After the sound was fixed, Firefox couldn't start but Opera was ok. All this happened when Nepomuk popped up by itself. I cannot imagine what caused it to run. I made a mental note that if Nepomuk pops up again in my next install, I would have to check Firefox, MyComputer, CD/DVD drives, USF flash drive mounting & Gimp. Sure enough, none of these are working. So back to square one.

Third install was done on a totally cleaned out disk. I couldn't use console to log in to configure my nvidia drive. It would flash briefly with prompt to login, but doesn't give me enough time to finish typing username before it vanished, leaving a blank screen. I finally managed to exit Xscreen by doing Ctr+Alt+F2, altho I had to do that twice, once to type in username, then to type password. Nvidia xconfig completed but settings saved were lost every time the computer boots. Next thing I did was to install libdvdcss, disable repo and then switched to Packman for remainder of mutimedia codecs. KMail behaved ok this time (new messages & font color assigned worked) Address Book imported was nowhere to be found under Personal Contacts. Firefox didn't crash after update to 16.01. I then proceeded to check sound as there was none. I proceeded to assign default sound card (have 2, 1 an onboard intel card that was disabled and one creative as primary). As I was setting the Creative sound card as default, nepomuk popped up for the first time since installation. I immediately proceeded to check the same thing - MyComputer, Firefox, Gimp, mounting USB drive, CD & DVD drives, and sure enough, all the same problems returned. This time, Opera wouldn't start either and KNotify crashed after opening up to tell me whichever program crashed. I disabled nepomuk and MyComputer displayed the disks again, but USB or optical disk drives still could not be mounted. No sound except for my French!!

It is at this point that I thought it might be better to revert back to version 11.4. However, the security issue is utmost in my concern about this decision. As you say, Evergreen may not be all that reliable. I do not have any error logs from all the previous malfunctions because I honestly do not even know where to start looking. I have never experienced anakondi & nepomuk before, I previously could import my address book into KMail without a hitch, apart from testing the sound in Yast and assigning the sound card that tested with sound, everything ran without a hitch.

I suspect the crashes may be due to nepomuk not being able to handle my amateur commands - like mucking around with setting default sound cards, running printer setup again, importing address books etc. When the text console login didn't run, I did not get any message, just a blank screen. Crashes after 3rd install never had a chance to display any error messages except for the KNotify that crashed as well.

I will not be able to post any message logs as the computer is now being wiped clean yet again. However, it would be really helpful if there is a place where I can get a good installation guide, a bit more detailed than the en.opensuse.org install guide. According to them, once you downloaded& installed the restricted formats, you will be up & running. Took me a while before I found an alternative way to run as root on runlevel3 apart from using the console login.

I hope my brief description of what happened could give you a sketchy idea of what might have happened, and what might have caused them.

Again, thank you so much for bothering to even read & reply to my post. I hope I do not have to ditch Linux and become a microserf once again.

OK, there is a lot there and I don't have time currently to go through in absolute detail, but

• An openSUSE install doesn't clear out all settings from the previous install, necessarily (obviously, it does it you re-format everything). I know only upgrades to sequential versions are supposed to work, but, if you install over a non-sequential version, you do get some of your old settings.
• in particular, kde is usually problematic when any change is made to the kde version and the old .kde4 is still in place (/home/username/.kde4). It is irritating to lose all of your kde setup and have to start again from scratch, but I have learnt that you are going to wipe out the old .kde4 (rename, actually, if you are conservative) eventually, if you want stuff to work, so you might as well do it straight off the bat

http://thomasmcguire.wordpress.com/2...igi-explained/
https://kdenepomukmanual.wordpress.c...epomuk-manual/

(given that .kde4 is in /home/username/... for each user, if you format the volume where that is, you start again from fresh; if you re-use the existing partition to preserve the data in /home, this usually does bite...it didn't used to bite (or, at least not hard) back in the kde3 days, from what I remember....progress....

gak! meant to say, I don't have any particular reason to distrust 'Evergreen', but I don't have any particular reason to know that they do what I would want, either. Given that other people may want different things from the Evergreen project, whether they do what I want, or not, has to be an open question, particularly when they don't yet have a maintainer declared for the version that you will be relying on.

(Specifically, on my laptop, I had a lot of 'repos with people's names in the titles', as for some non-mainstream software those get more recent versions, if the software is in the main repos at all. I haven't checked, but I have severe doubts as to whether that sort of stuff gets updated once things are in 'Evergreen mode'; I'm not even sure who I'd point the finger at, if it went wrong; Evergreen, or the named repo owner? Very mainstream stuff that everybody wants/uses is probably a safer bet.)

Thanks. I do hope you will get a chance to read my rambling post and shed some light to help me avoid the same mistakes this time.

DBan Boot & Nuke is running as I type. When you say "rename" do you mean I should use different username, user & root password? The installation just before wiping my disk again was from a nuked disk and I had more problems than before. Why's that?

What I meant was that you should rename '.kde4' to, say, '.kde4_3_nov_2012' (or whatever takes your fancy, like the current date or version of kde with which it was (somewhat) useful). That's just in case

• something does go wrong in the new version and you want to see if your older set-up had the same problem, but you hadn't noticed (unlikely,, well unlikely than it will help, anyway)
• you want to know what kde extensions you used to have and are prepared to spelunk the files in an attempt to find out

No idea.