Ed Harrison
I just got a copy of SuSE 7.1 Upgrade. The packaging is almost worthless -- not anything about upgrading.
I agree the documentation about upgrades should be _much better_. It should mention the procedure, resulting changes, possible problems, and it should be written for system administrators (professionals). I tried to upgrade 7.0 to 7.1 on my PC server (2x550 MHz, 512 MiB RAM). YaST2 was easy to use, and the upgrade proceeded quickly in the beginning. In the middle of the upgrade of approx. 1300 packages, I got a message about a Gnome package being older that the one already installed, and manual confirmation was needed in order to proceed. Many other Gnome and KDE packages had the same problem. Clicking OK soon appeared to be problematic since it took about 1-2 minutes for the rpm to process each of those packages. The whole installation would have taken days if I had done it this way. I aborted it, started again, and deselected all Gnome and KDE packages in YaST2 (it was laborious). YaST2 continued the upgrade but having encountered the same problem with a package I had forgotten to deselect I finally stopped the upgrade and made a new installation of 7.1. The new installation was fast so I could restore critical services soon, but the restoration of all services took me several days. -- Alexandr.Malusek@imv.liu.se