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).