Installation of openSUSE 10.3 (10.2 to 10.3 upgrade)

So openSUSE 10.3 came out, I checked it out and liked it, and wanted to upgrade my 10.2 system to the new distro. I started by hitting the Web in search of information about how to do this and whether it is possible. I found several articles about upgrading from 10.2, but the options discussed were not available on the liveCD I downloaded. I had booted into the 10.3 four or five times, and I couldn't figure out how to upgrade my system. I really didn't want to start from scratch by formatting my partition, which was the only apparent choice available to me during the 10.3 install setup.

Then it dawned on me. When I was installing 10.2, the setup was asking whether I wanted to create a separate /home partition. I am the kind of guy who does not like to create many partitions, whether C: D: E: on Windows or elsewhere. I thought creating /home on a separate partition was dumb, but I went along with what openSUSE 10.2 suggested, which was to create /home on a separate partition. Staring at the 10.3 install screen it occurred to me why in the hell anyone would create a separate /home partition. It is precisely for situations like the one I was just sitting in. I could format my root partition and keep all my files and settings on my separate /home partition.

Interestingly, openSUSE 10.3 auto partition config wanted to format my /home partition and not format anything else. I had to choose manual setup and told the system to format only the root and leave the other two (swap and home) untouched. I had actually initially specified not to format anything, but openSUSE complained that it might not work; that is, installing a new OS onto an already existing partition OS might not work. I thought about this for a minute and agreed that would be pretty messed up. So I chose to format the root and leave the other partitions as they were.

During setup, my session switched to a tty terminal twice. I thought if I didn't know how to return to the graphical interface, I'd be screwed (ctrl+alt+F1, F2... F7... etc.). The setup progressed fairly quickly without any other issues. The system rebooted properly and noticeably faster. However, I did not get a GUI. Instead, YaST started in text mode. There, I was presented with some choices of repositories and downloaded several packages. When the process completed, I was kicked out into a terminal session with no GUI.

Well, I was there before (after 10.2 installation), so I learned how to recover from it. Interestingly though, the liveCD correctly identified my video cards and started X on the right one without any issues. I wonder why this couldn't be repeated on my newly installed system.

I started Sax2. It did not start. I punched in sax2 -p to see which chip was which, and my NVIDIA card was 0. Thus, I restarted sax2 with the option -c0. It took off that time. I was presented with a default 1600x1200 resolution and saved settings to xorg.conf or whatever the configuration file was.

Back at the terminal, I typed rcxdm to start the X server session. It came up with no issues, and even some of the apps I had open during my last 10.2 session opened up when I logged in. When OpenOffice opened itself, it complained that user (me) from another machine was accessing the file. The other machine was, of course, the removed 10.2 system. I just thought it was cool how it remembered the file was being accessed, even thought the machine no longer existed.

Pretty much right after the installation I opened YaST. I heard it was supposed to be faster, and it was. It seemed "lighter." I searched for several apps I had installed on 10.2, and YaST found them faster than it would on 10.2. I installed those and went for a reboot to see if everything would completely and properly start up. The machine booted up again, noticeably faster, and this time it went all the way into the KDE session. Sweet!

I already mentioned some of the improvements of 10.3 over 10.2 in my previous post. What I didn't mention was the mutli-column display in Konqueror. It works much nicer in that the entire filename is displayed. The thumbnails also load faster.

All in all, the upgrade from openSUSE 10.2 to openSUSE 10.3 was by far the simplest, fastest, most pleasant and satisfying upgrade I've ever done on any Linux distro, still despite few small issues encountered. I was up and running in under an hour, which was absolutely fantastic.