Open SuSE Upgrade Experience

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

and followed the procedure.  Everything went really well and seemed obvious until I ran the command:

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.