Nov 9, 2009

Live upgrade from openSUSE 11.0 to 11.2

Article update: it turns out many people come here hoping to find a solution and are disappointed to find only problems that I encountered.. Sorry, that's too bad. Until someone figures out a way to do it online, your best option is to boot off the Network installation CD (100MB).

On Saturday I upgraded my wife's laptop from openSUSE 11.0 to 11.2 RC. I did it using zypper dup, and there were some problems so here I describe them for the benefit of others who might try the same.
  1. Edited /etc/zypp/repos.d/* to replace all 11.0 occurences with 11.2. It worked also for Packman and Videolan.
  2. zypper in zypper offered a suspiciously large update. It turned out it wanted to switch from x86_64 to i586, boo! The fix was zypper in zypper.x86_64\>1
  3. That did not go well. It installed the new rpm.rpm and then repo2solv failed, terminating the transaction. After that, I had the old libzypp and the new zypper, not working. So I manually downloaded the libraries and installed them using rpm, ignoring the broken dependencies for the yast2-* packages.
  4. Changed commit.downloadMode to DownloadInHeaps in /etc/zypp/zypp.conf, which exists primarily to avoid the previous problem. But Murphy does know when to strike.
  5. zypper dup
Note that from 11.1 to 11.2, I used the live upgrade method without such problems. But for 11.0, you may be better off booting from an installation disc.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Felipe said...

terribly unhelpful. This doesn't show me how to upgrade reliably. This only chronicles your experience. First hit on google too. shame.

Anonymous said...

Not helpful at all.

Gabriel Miretti said...

Thanks Martin for inspiring me. I didn't follow your steps exactly because I've a lot of repositories to purge and some DVDs to use. But knowing your experience, I didn't try your 2nd step, and directly install the new version of zypper (and its dependencies) via rpm, avoiding some headhaches.

Harald said...

Thanks for sharing your experience. I've found a way to upgrade live. Its described on the suse wike and can be found here : http://en.opensuse.org/Upgrade/11.2#Implementation

Martin Vidner said...

Mr. Anderson, your link applies to 11.1→11.2 which did work fine for me. It was the "skip one" upgrade 11.0→11.2 where I had problems, and I'm afraid the linked article does not address them.