Best Upgrade strategy for OpenSuse 10.0 to 11.1?
 

Hi, I have some old and outdated PC which was not used for a long time to 'reactivate' and use with OpenSuse 11.1. Currently it has OpenSuse 10.0 installed.

I'd like to know about a good upgrade strategy how to upgrade (most) easiest and without breaking too much. Is the Opensuse 'Internet Installation Boot Image' enough for upgrading?

Since OpenSuse 11.1 is now released for some time, are there any experiences in doing such a major upgrade? Can anyone confirm that it works?

Thankful for hints and pointers! :)

I'm a bit cautious about 'upgrading' a system. From my past experience, old versions of libraries/programs/etc/, may be left hanging around, to cause problems.

IMO, I'd grab a new hard drive (they're very cheap these days), and install 11.1 to it, cleanly. Leave the second drive alone, and either mount it up under 11.1 and copy your data off, or grab a cheap USB/Firewire drive enclosure, and shove it in there for backup use later.

You CAN run the internet installation, and it will do an upgrade, but I haven't gone down the upgrade-road for quite some time. I always tend to do fresh installations.

I recently upgraded a laptop from 10.2 (?) to 11.1, and I wish that I hadn't. Doing a clean install, but preserving /home has always worked well for me, but this didn't.

(Separate /home partition, tell it to blow everything else away and keep /home. You'll need a backup of /home and probably /etc anyway, so do that as well.)

Having said that, it all seemed fixable, but it was unnecessary footling about, and a bit of a waste of time, to do it.

So far, I did clean installs, too.

But this takes quite some time to backup/swap HDs and configure all settings new.

Lost time, IFF the upgrade route would only leave some old config-files/libs abandoned.

But in case it does not go smoothly, it may take much more time with tedious fiddling and fixing the arising problems...

Currently, if I have to install anew, I will skip OpenSuse and use GentooHardened on this PC, too, as used on my servers.

'Am undecided yet ...

Just read your posting after I finished mine.

So the possibly 'saved time' during the upgrade was consumed by fixing things later on. And the version leap between my versions is even bigger, so the problems won't be smaller... ;)

Then I'd install completely new.

I've gone the route I described (old hard drive, untouched, into an external enclosure), several times. Always worked well, and didn't have to make fresh, full backups (your old drive is untouched and disconnected, can't get safer than that. :) ) Once the new install goes on, just plug it in, and copy over what you need...USB2.0 or Firewire speeds go pretty quick. Last external enclosure I bought from Newegg was $23....

Yes, I would say I have wasted at least as much time as I saved, if not two or three times more (although I'm only guessing about how many problems I would have had). But then, you could accuse me of being a fiddler (like, I've got more than half a dozen different GUIs installed, which even I concede is more than I need), which doesn't help.

I have decided to install GentooHardened on this PC. Once the initial compilation is done and X-Server exceptions are allowed in PaX, it runs fine.

And other than with major binary distributions, I only compile with the features I want, leaving less vulnerability surface.