Updateing from OpenSUSE 11.1 to 11.2

For a while I thought there was no straight upgrade path from OpenSUSE 11.1 to 11.2.  Indeed, when I first checked the opensuse.org website had told me that I must do a fresh install, or minimally do an update via a live CD due to compatiblity issues.  However, yesterday I was having some issues with Prism and decided to check again.    Here is what I learned.

• Upgrades are now fully supported: http://en.opensuse.org/Upgrade/Supported
  
• OpenSUSE has a program called "zypper" that is similar to debian's apt-get
• zypper reporsitories can be eaisly added / removed and updated

The process of updating consists of the following:

1. *Back up your /boot/grub/menu.lst file (not mentioned in the above link)
   
2. Check your sources and rename any repositories that will be updated
3. Disable all current repositories
   
4. Add the updated repository sources.
5. Refresh the repository list and download the latest version of zypper
   
6. Download all the packages before installing.
   
7. Install the new packages.
   

Zypper commands 

List your repositories

zypper ls -d

Changing the name of a generic repository (to keep for legacy purposes):

zypper renamerepo repo-oss 111-repo-oss

Disabling all repositories:

zypper modifyrepo --all --disable

Adding the new 11.2 repositories:

zypper addrepo --name "openSUSE-11.2 OSS" http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.2/repo/oss/ repo-oss
zypper addrepo --name "openSUSE-11.2 Non-OSS" http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.2/repo/non-oss/ repo-non-oss
zypper addrepo --name "openSUSE-11.2 Updates" http://download.opensuse.org/update/11.2/ repo-update

Adding other repositories (by url):

zypper ar  

Refresing the repositories:

zypper refresh 

Installing a single new package (new version of zypper)

zypper in zypper 

Downloading packages with out installing:

zypper dup -d

Installing all updated packages:

zypper dup 

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Problems I Encountered

KDM didn't launch after installing and restarting

I dealt with this by logging in as a normal user then at the prompt typeing the command:

startX

The Xserver crashed

as superuser I restored the old xconfig file:

sudo su 

mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bad

cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf.saxsave /etc/X11/xorg.conf

exit

then tried restarting X again

startX

KDE didn't work well on first run and the widgets had a tenancy to crash, so after playing around and ensuring that KDM was indeed installed, I restarted again and everything was much smoother.  Restarting was a bit tricky as it couldn't be done graphically or via sudo.  One had to actually log in as root to command a restart.

su

restart

At this point I noticed that my grub config file had been overwritten and I could no longer boot my other linux (Sidux) partition.  I had to restore using the menu.lst file on the Sidux partition, but that was a bit of a headache, hopefully the rest of you backed up your menu.lst file somewhere