I'm trying to decided whether it would be beneficial and what exactly would an upgrade do to my existing OS and additional programs that I've struggled with to get installed.

Would it be just cosmetic?..ie, KDE3.4 to KDE3.5?
My main concerned is about keeping the programs (not included in the original install of 10.0)...would the upgrade effect area's like the kernal/drivers...etc?

thought please and thanks in advance...

I don't use that distro, but for whatever it's worth, I've heard rave reviews about OpenSuse 10.2. Though, if you want the full effect, you may need to reinstall instead of upgrade.

I did this upgrade last month. It is a big difference 10.0 to 10.2. 10.2 looks much nicer, has a better update system and the kde bits are newer.

The upgarde will generally un-install any non-standard programmes that you have installed. So for example if you had MPlayer on 10.0 it will remove this and you would need to install the MPlayer version for 10.2 (say from the packman site).

So in answer to your question I would say 'yes' upgrade - unless it would be too much of a nightmare to reinstall the extra programmes that you have on 10.0.

The other point to perhaps keep in mind is that 10.0 will soon be not far from being obsolete - in terms of critical updates and the like. This last reason was why I upgraded (as I had 10.0 running lovely and was using a programme that would not work with 10.1 or 10.2). Really glad that I did - as 10.0 does look a bit tired now on an old back-up p/c and I managed to get my old programme working using an old version of kdepim - with 10.2.

thanks for both of your replies...

Sepero - I looked for a live version of 10.2 but no luck, and from the few screenshots I could find and the info/doc I've read I think your right about being a good upgrade/OS...and yes the full install is probably what I'm going to do.

dth1 - so I quess if the upgrade would remove the programs in question than why not do a full install ...make sense to me, not sure I'm really going to miss any of the programs I keep talking about (there's only 7 of them).

Q = after backing up my bookmarks where can I find my Thunderbird mail foler?...is it in the .firefox directory?

I had to go the up-grade route from 10.0 to 10.2 as if I set up the programme - that I wanted to keep - in 10.0 and opted to keep the programme in 10.2 (the default choice on up-upgrading is to remove in 10.20). Then downgraded to an earlier version of kdepim it works. If I did a clean install (usually the best option) and downgraded kdepim it still wouldn't work.

Thunderbird mails are in a hidden folder in your /home folder. If you select the option to show hidden folders (under the View option) you can find them in:-

.thunderbird/randomletters&numbers.default/Mail/Local Folders

I suggest backing up all of /home. If you don't have your /home on a separate partition, you might want to consider creating one for it. I never have to worry about upgrades or reinstalls because /home is never touched. (I just have to make sure it's in /etc/fstab)

It's a good idea to backup /etc too.