On Friday 21 December 2007 14:48:27 Joe Sloan wrote: > Chris Arnold wrote: > > I use SLED SP1 and wonder if it is possible to upgrade from SLED to > > 10.3 without losing data on the hard drive? If so, can someone > > instruct me on how to do this? > > Do you really want to do that? sled is polished, it's a nice mature > desktop. Sure, 10.3 will be more bleeding edge, newer packages, but I'm > not sure I'd call it an "upgrade" - If you want to install a lot of new > stuff though, os might be a better choice for you.
With SLED unless you pay for a subscription you will only get security updates/patches for a limited time. That is one reason to use openSuse for personal/home use instead... > > You can always do a fresh install, telling it not to touch your /home > partition. I can't think of any reason why it shouldn't "just work", but > OTOH 'm not sure an "upgrade" from sled to os is an officially supported > action - but hey, it would be an interesting exercise. Be sure and let > us know the results. I concur - almost. The problem with not formatting /home is that certain hidden folders hold your personal config files that may differ between versions. My advice (having done this recently going from another distro to 10.3) is to: 1. Backup /etc to catch any custom configs that you may have done (e.g. cron files, spam filter configs, X11 configs, samba configs etc) 2. Backup your /home folders for each user of the machine 3. Backup any other custom config files that you may need and any downloaded files that you need to keep (e.g. for apps that you want to reinstall that are not inlcluded in the distro) that are not stored in your /home folder 4. Note the UID/GID for each existing user and group on the machine. 5. If you're using a custom partition layout and you want to keep it the same, print a copy of /etc/fstab (or just copy down the output from 'mount') to refer to during the install. In my case I had 4 partitions that had data stored (other than /home) that I wanted left alone and mounted in the same place. 6. Do a clean install formatting all partitions including /home. 7. Recreate the users and any additional groups using the same UID/GID's as before. You may get away with just copying back /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow and /etc/group back from your backup but I prefer to recreate the users specifying the UID/GID for each user/group. 8. Merge any custom configs from your /etc backup to the relevant files on the new install. 9. Copy the user data from the /home backups to the new /home folders (including files such as .procmailrc if you used it and things like configs for evolution, kmail etc.). 10. Test the system and make sure that you haven't missed anything. There may be others on the list with better suggestions but this process worked for me. I just upgraded from FC6 to 10.3 by going through this process and everything went pretty smoothly (with only a few minor glitches that were easily sorted). Hope this helps (and doesn't put you off) :-). Regards, Rodney. -- =================================================== Rodney Baker VK5ZTV [EMAIL PROTECTED] =================================================== -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
