I don't usually make this type of post, but I decided to make an exception
this time.

  I had been using OpenSUSE 10.2 for a rather long time, and decided to
finally upgrade to 11.0. My experiences have been mostly positive so far.

  Making a major system upgrade (from 10.x to 11.x in this case) on a
running system is theoretically possible through extensive trickery, but
not officially supported nor recommended. The official way for making
the upgrade is to boot to the 11.0 installation DVD or the Internet
installation CD. I decided to do the latter because I didn't feel like
downloading an entire DVD and burn it (it *is* possible to mount and
boot to an iso image using grub, but I didn't feel like finding out how
it's done, as it's very easy to just burn the CD image into a CD-RW and
boot with it).

  The upgrading went rather smoothly. The CD asked if I wanted to perform
a clean install or an upgrade, and in the latter case it analyzed the
existing OpenSUSE system and automatically resolved what would have to be
replaced to convert it to 11.0. (There were some unresolved dependencies
which had to be manually resolved, mainly related to third-party libraries
which were locked in the program management system, but that was simply a
question of going through the list of such unresolved dependencies and
selecting what should be done with them from a radio buttons list.)

  Then it downloaded some 5 GB worth of packages, which took some hours.
After that, it booted to the new installed OS, and everything seemed to
work just well and all of my settings and programs were preserved.
(Well, there was no hardware graphics acceleration, but I was completely
expecting that, because I have an ATI card and it has a closed linux
driver. Installing the latest driver solved that problem.)

  OpenSUSE has this policy that they never perform major software upgrades
on a stable version of OpenSUSE, only security patch releases, so a bunch
of things were upgraded. The kernel was upgraded to the 2.6.25.16 branch,
firefox was upgraded to 3.0.1, gcc was upgraded to 4.3.1 (from 4.1.2), etc.

  The Yast2 software manager is enormously faster now, as they fixed the
problem in the earlier version (it always took several minutes to start
up because it downloaded and parsed a big bunch of XML files every time).

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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