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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Good to know.  Everything is just Ubuntu these days...

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Warp wrote:
>   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.

I saw a description once of how to install FreeBSD on a running Linux 
machine and make it dual-boot, all without anything but ssh access to 
the machine. (I.e., you could do it with a locked-down machine in 
another city.)  Pretty funky.

>   Then it downloaded some 5 GB worth of packages, which took some hours.

I wonder if it would restart properly were it interrupted, or if the 
network failed. Seems like it pulled down more than it would have if you 
had the DVD burned. :-)

> 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.

That's good to know. Maybe if I leave the job using 10.2 I'll upgrade to 
11.0 at home.

>   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).

Oh good. That was always a pain in the butt for me. Especially manually 
upgrading a dozen remote machines. Sheesh. :-)  Every time that started, 
I thought "what, can't they see they just downloaded that 5 minutes ago?"

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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My experiences upgrading from 10.x to 11.0 were similar as well.

Jim

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On Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:51:50 -0700, Darren New wrote:

>>   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).
> 
> Oh good. That was always a pain in the butt for me. Especially manually
> upgrading a dozen remote machines. Sheesh. :-)  Every time that started,
> I thought "what, can't they see they just downloaded that 5 minutes
> ago?"

Yeah, they changed to using packagekit for the software management piece, 
it seems.  I'm very happy with the performance....

Jim

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Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
>   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).

  Oh, and I forgot to mention:

  Previously if you wanted to add some official (or semiofficial)
repository to the software manager, you had to go to the OpenSUSE
website and search for those repositories and then add them manually.

  The newer version offers you all the official and a few semiofficial
repositories as clickable options right on the Yast2 configuration. No
need to hunt them and entering them manually.

  Small, but nice improvement.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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First impression of Firefox 3:

  They finally fixed the problem which happens with anchors. In all earlier
versions when there was a long page with images, and you loaded an url to
that page and the url had an anchor (ie. # followed by the name of the
anchor at the end of the url), the browser would immediately jump to the
location of the anchor in the page as soon as the page contents were
loaded. The problem is that the images in the page have yet not all been
loaded, and when they load, they change the layout of the page, making
the location of the anchor in that page to go down. In the worst case it
would go out of the visible part of the page.

  Firefox 3 seems to have fixed this. It first jumps to the anchor, and
after all the images have loaded and the layout of the page settled, it
jumps there again. That way you will see what you were supposed to see
even after the layout of the page changes because of the images.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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I just like the fact that when doing the networked install, you no 
longer have to look up and write down the IP address and full path for 
the download server. Seriously, booting the CD and having to type in an 
IP address and 12-element pathname was Not Fun. At least the new version 
doesn't require this. (It's unclear to me whether it actually selects 
the nearest mirror or just downloads from the default one, but it works.)

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