Don’t Use Zypper to Upgrade OpenSuse

OpenSuse gecko

I installed OpenSuse on my work computer and I’ve been really happy with it so far. Recently, OpenSuse came out with a new version 11.1 so I figured I would upgrade. Since this was my first time updating, I turned to google and the first result for “upgrade opensuse 11.1” is this page about zypper on the OpenSuse site. It sure sounds easy, just run zypper and OpenSuse will upgrade in the background.

But after 5 hours of installation fun (Want me to fall back to /dev/mapper/...?) I just wanted to warn people that this is not the way to go. Somehow zypper decided that my computer would function just fine without supporting the harddrive (RAID0) but I was forced to disagree with this point when my computer became unbootable. Luckily the installation DVD (after finally downloading) was able to fix the problem.

So if you’re planning on upgrading your OpenSuse, I would say it’s definitely worth just downloading the DVD and updating from that (which actually went really smoothly).

Yes I do (now) realize the zypper upgrade page says:

This method is unsupported. The official method of upgrading to a new release is by using the latest DVD. To start the upgrade you boot from the DVD and start installation, at some point you will be prompted to either do a New Installation or Upgrade, at that point you select Upgrade and continue with the setup.

But I didn’t realize that translated to really really don’t use this method. Anyway live and learn and now I know it’s really easy to upgrade from the DVD.