Upgrade » Penguins and stuff

Upgrading to openSUSE 12.3 with zypper, and a short first look at the new 12.3

Apr 152013

Like I already said before, openSUSE 12.3 was released today, and I’ve done the usual live upgrade with zypper.

The upgrade itself worked without any problems, and the resulting installation was usable without issues right from the start.

I logged into KDE 4.10 and everything that I’ve tried works just fine. I admit, I can’t say anything about performance as my test machine is accessed via a NoMachine remote desktop session.

After that I upgraded the KDE 4.10.0 to 4.10.1 from the opensuse build service, and that also went well and posed no problems afterwards. Now I’m waiting for my own repository for 12.3 to rebuild against KDE:Release:410.

I’m pretty confident in saying that with 12.3 the process of a live update via zypper can be done without major fear, as long as one has ones repositories set up properly, and with the right priorities (packman and KDE from OBS should have a higher priority than the stop openSUSE repositories).

openSUSE 12.3 is here

openSUSE 1 Response »

Mar 132013

Today, openSUSE 12.3 got released after 6 months of hard work by openSUSE members and contributors.

As usual, I’m doing a zypper live upgrade, but so far it’s still downloading packages, so I can’t say anything about 12.3 just yet.

I am going to post a review of the process and the results after it is finished. In the mean time, if you’re in the area (southern Germany), why not go to the release party in Nürnberg? It starts at 7pm at artefakt.

A short sum-up about openSUSE 12.2

openSUSE No Responses »

Jan 102013

I’ve done it, and upgraded my wife’s and my own laptop to openSUSE 12.2 with zypper, following the same procedure as mentioned before. My experiences so far:

My wife had trouble with pulseaudio / phonon playing correctly through HDMI to the built-in speakers on her monitor. I had to actually delete all user settings for phonon, pulseaudio, and gstreamer, but now it works without a hitch.
Initially some KDE apps didn’t want to remember that they are supposed to start minimized. Same as before, deleting the settings files solved it.
Certain older software that comes only as binary does not work anymore. No actual surprise there.
Certain older games from some of the humble bundles that comes as binary RPM got uninstalled because openSUSE 12.2 does not have the required libraries anymore. No surprise there either, and no personal loss as I played those only on my phone.
Certain older software does not build anymore because it comes with old, outdated versions of some required libraries, and those don’t build with gcc 4.7.1.
After a resume, the network interfaces are still down. Not good when you’re operating on a NIS/NFS setup. Workaround: disable automatic suspend to disk.

Enough of the bad, here are some few of the positive things that stand out:

With the 3.4 kernel we can have Solaar which basically monitors the battery charge in logitech wireless equipment.
Steam runs on it. Yep, steam as in http://store.steampowered.com/. Maybe linux gaming will finally get somewhere where Loki games should have taken it 10 years ago.
The whole setup feels snappier than 12.1.

All in all, this upgrade is one of the better ones. I like it so far.

I’m being scary again… zypper upgrading 12.1 to 12.2

openSUSE 1 Response »

Dec 122012

I’m doing it again. Upgrading a live system with zypper, this time the step is 12.1->12.2.

The procedure has been described here and here; let’s see what happens.

Update:

Everything worked fine, with the small exception that the ssh daemon config needed one small tweak to get nxserver to work again.
Hint: nxserver uses authorized_keys2, suse uses authorized_keys as the ssh key file name.

Upgrading to 11.4, an even riskier way.

openSUSE, Tips & Tricks 4 Responses »

Mar 172011

Here’s a little followup to my previous post about how to upgrade to 11.4.

This one describes how to make the whole process even more risky. You have been warned.
It’s even possible to do this remotely through a ssh session. If you attempt to do that, do it from inside a screen session!

Actually, this first bit makes it a bit easier:

#!/bin/bash

repodir=/etc/zypp/repos.d
newrepodir=/etc/zypp/repos.d_11.4
old=11.3
new=11.4

mkdir -p ${newrepodir}

cd ${repodir}

for repofile in *repo; do
{
 echo -n converting ${repofile} to ${newrepodir}/$(echo ${repofile}|sed -e 's/11.3/11.4/g') ... ;
 cat "${repofile}" | sed -e 's/11.3/11.4/g' > "${newrepodir}/$(echo ${repofile}|sed -e 's/11.3/11.4/g')" ;
 echo done.
}

done;

This script creates a directory /etc/zypp/repos.d_11.4 with all your configured repos switched to their 11.4 counterparts.

After you run this script, all you have to do is move the old /etc/zypp/repos.d out of the way, rename the new one to /etc/zypp/repos.d and make sure that all the paths in the repo files exist. If they don’t, “zypp ref” is going to complain.

now, before you begin, run these two commands:

zypper cc --all
zypper ref

The first one clears all zypper cache folders, the second one refreshes all repositories (here’s where you’ll see if all paths are correct).
If you have a custom X11 setup (dualscreen or such), now would be the point to make a copy of your xorg.conf file.
Now you jump into the instructions in my previous post, right at #6.

Upgrade to openSUSE 11.4, the risky way

openSUSE, Tips & Tricks 5 Responses »

Mar 142011

Here’s a quick and dirty HOWTO about upgrading from openSUSE 11.3 to 11.4, with all additional repos enabled…

Switch to runlevel 3: as root, execute “init 3″
Login as root
Make a backup of all your repositories:
```
cd /etc/zypp
cp -r repos.d repos.d_11.3
```

Go through all your .repo files in /etc/zypp/repos.d and replace “11.3″ with “11.4″.
Here’s a “before/after” example:
before:

[openSUSE 11.3 OSS]
name=Haupt-Repository (OSS)
enabled=1
autorefresh=0
baseurl=http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.3/repo/oss/
path=/
type=yast2
keeppackages=0

after:

[openSUSE 11.4 OSS]
name=Haupt-Repository (OSS)
enabled=1
autorefresh=0
baseurl=http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.4/repo/oss/
path=/
type=yast2
keeppackages=0

Refresh your repository cache:
```
zypper ref
```
Upgrade zypper:
```
zypper install zypper
```
You have to pay attention on the list of conflicts. Generally the best of the proposed solutions is the one the would uninstall the least number of packages while still installing/upgrading what you want.
Do the full upgrade:
```
zypper dup
```
Again, pay attention to any listed conflicts, and resolve them carefully. Again, the best of the proposed solution would be the one that installs what you want while uninstalling as little as possible.
The scary moment:
Reboot your system. If all went well you will be greeted by a working openSUSE 11.4 installation.
Cleaning up afterwards:
Login as root, and run the following command:
```
LANG=CTYPE zypper search -si | grep "(System Packages)"| cut -d "|" -f 2
```
That will list all installed packages that are not available from any of the configured repositories anymore.
You might want to carefully remove them one by one with “zypper remove”. If you use “zypper remove -u” instead, you will also remove all dependencies that are not needed anymore. This can really break things.

openSUSE 11.3 … I am impressed.

openSUSE 2 Responses »

Jul 232010

Just after we came back from our summer vacation I started upgrading a few computers to openSUSE 11.3, and I have to say, I found that to be pleasantly painless.

When I did that with 11.2, I found some major pains, but in 11.3, the "zypper dup" upgrade is officially supported, and "just works". So far I’ve done four machines, three of them had given me major headache when I upped them to 11.2 (as seen here).

With 11.3, the upgrade simply worked, seamless, even while still using the laptop in case for my daily work!

Now here are some few pros and cons that I’ve discovered so far:

The Pros

Like I said, you can upgrade a running system from 11.2 to 11.3 with the "zypper dup" approach described in the suse wiki. Take note to change EVERY repository to the 11.3 version, and disable/remove the ones that you won’t need.
Automatic X11 configuration works like a charm
The whole desktop (I’m using KDe 4.4.4 which is included with 11.3) feels very polished

The Cons

It took some time for the nvidia drivers to appear; without them the automatic X11 configuration would have failed, or rather, defaulted to that noveau driver which is not quite ready for use. Who in his right mind would include a driver at that state in a release.
SCPM config management will have to be redone in two cases… Time to rethink some settings anyways.
In one case I need a kernel parameter at boot time to disable the internal display of my lenovo laptop at work, because the thing doesn’t disable it from the bios if the laptop its in its docking station with the lid closed. Not exactly openSUSEs fault here.

Summary:

Go for it. It is good.