Regular readers will recall that I, like many others here, run more than one type of Linux. In particular, I run mandriva on my file server, the old Dell box under my desk. Its a good, solid machine, well engineered, even if, by todays standards, under powered. That's got to change. A replacement is on the way. But even so, initially it will run of the same disk, same mandriva. Mandriva has got to go. Its not being maintained aggressively. Mandriva 2012 Alpha came out in September, two months late. Distrowatch tells me that Alpha 2 came out earlier this month, so I can expect mandriva 2012 some time in 2013. I think I'll change. The disk in my server is large and runs LVM apart from the root partition, which includes /boot. I have no problem creating a new LVM partition that is root+/usr and using the old root partition as /boot. A 700G /boot :-) Plenty of room for all the stuff in grub2. Like Fedora and openSuse, Mandriva is a RPM based distribution. Now my question. Is the installer for openSuse 12 smart enough to a) deal with root+/usr in a LVM partition? if /boot is in the physical partition... b) recognise and preserve all the config files in the /etc in the LVM partition c) recognise all the installed applications with the "-mdv2011*" suffix and replace them with - possibly later version - openSuse equivalents? What I'm asking is 'can I do an 'upgrade' across distributions? I'd hate to do a 'rpm -q -a' on the present system and then manually make sure all the stuff was installed in the new. Googling for "linux upgrade across distributions" doesn't return a lot that seems helpful. This http://news.opensuse.org/2012/09/05/opensuse-12-2-green-means-go/ claims that the " latest release of the world’s most powerful and flexible Linux Distribution" ... Flexible? What if I just install Zypper and try to do a live update? Thoughts and suggestions, please -- Marketing is the science of convincing us that What You Get Is What You Want. -- John Carter -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org