2010.02.13 Sunday 11:30AM - Sometime last summer (2010) I had a 3.0gHz dual core AMD Athlon 64 machine die. Originally I thought it was a video card problem but after everything I went through to get the machine back on line, I've concluded that the CPU was bad. Originally I had a slightly slower CPU which I over-clocked by 5% and was very happy with. My wifes machine, at the time, was a single core AMD 64bit machine from Dell running Windows-XP. I wanted to get her a faster machine so I simply ordered a slightly faster CPU for my machine and replaced her 2.3gHz single core 64bit AMD Ahtlon CPU with a dual core 2.8gHz model. I was a little concerned with heat since the design of the Dell box was very proprietary and kept me from replacing the existing head sink with a more effective one. I installed the dual cpu in the Dell box, added copious amounts of thermal paste and reinstalled the Dell custom cooling solution. Her machine fired up, booted and Windows-XP detected new hardware - a CPU - and proceeded to install software to take advantage of the hardware. I also added extra memory to the Dell box and it's been working flawlessly since.
Back to my machine - the AMD processor was dead and I couldn't find a reasonable CPU replacement in a hurry so I bought a new motherboard, memory and an Intel 2.93 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU. I quickly put the machine together and started installing Open SuSE 11.2 Linux - I've been running SuSE distributions for years and am very comfortable and satisfied with the distribution. I used a boot DVD I made from a download and burn on another of my Linux machines (running OpenSuSE 10.2.) The installation went perfect as I expected it would, and before long, I was back online running NoMachine to view my desktop at work. This past Friday evening I decided to try an online update from SuSE 11.2 to 11.3. I didn't really have any problems I was trying to solve other than a screwed up system tray icon for controlling the volume of the sound system. I was mostly curious if I could get this upgrade done without having to install from scratch using media.
In order to find a procedure to follow that would get the job done I searched Google for:
upgrading suse 11.2 to 11.3
There were lots of responses, and being a bit lazy, I selected the first response
http://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-upgrade-opensuse-11.2-to-11.3-desktop-and-server
zypper dup
This command started running and indicated that 1960 packages were going to be updated. I have a very fast internet connection speed (25mbs) so I didn't think this was going to take very long. After 50 or so packages I got an error message and an error about a permission problem accessing the package. I selected retry and the problem was resolved, loading continued, and I thought no problem. Well, I couldn't have been more wrong. Another 10-20 packages and the same thing happened again. This continued through the entire process. What should have been a walk away installation took several hours of babysitting and retrying. When it was all done I rebooted the machine as indicated in the procedure, and my machine came to life looking like a fresh 11.3 installation. After 2 days, no issues and no problems. It's working just fine.
