On Sat, 2004-05-08 at 09:01, Donald Henson wrote:
I just received my SuSE 9.1 Upgrade package. (No email telling me it was coming. It just arrived unannounced.)
My home system consists of a Windows XP Professional workstation that has never been touched by Linux, a dual-boot (Windows XP/ SuSE Linux 9.0) laptop, and a SuSE Linux 9.0 fileserver/workstation (no Windows). All three are networked using CIFS and a Linksys router/switch. File shares are defined using Samba on the Linux systems. I plan to upgrade each system in sequence, starting with the Windows XP workstation, noting any problems encountered along the way. When I'm finished with all three upgrades, I'll post a summary of my experiences here, hoping this might assist someone else along the way.
Don Henson
Interim report. There's good news and bad news about my Windows XP workstation. The bad news is that I was unable to set up a dual boot system. The good news is that the problem had nothing to do with Linux. The problem was that I needed to create an unallocated partition. I used Partition Magic, which I have used before to good effect, but whenever Partition Magic tried to implement the changes, it reported that the Partition Table was bad. Tried lots of things but nothing worked. So I moved on to the laptop, already set up as a dual boot system. I tried to use the System Update module of YaST, telling YaST that I was upgrading a system. YaST reported about a gazillion broken dependencies and, while trying to resolve them, I managed to get things FUBAR. (I suspect that booting from the DVD would have worked better but I'll never know. Read on.) I decided to do a clean install as I really had no data on the laptop, at least none that needed to be recovered. The clean install worked great except for one thing. My laptop uses a pcmcia card for its Eternet connection. After configuring the network card as a pcmcia card, everything seemed to be okay until I tried to test the Internet connection. YaST reported no Internet connection because there was no pcmcia driver(?) software. After some messing around to no effect, I skipped the Internet test. After the initial boot, I used YaST to configure the card again and the network connection started to work. A small glitch on an unusual configuration. All in all, the clean install was a positive experience. I still have some configuration work to do but its late and that doesn't look like it's going to be a problem. Since I have yet to successfully complete an upgrade, as opposed to a clean install, I have decided to wait on upgrading my file server (and main workstation) until I've got my laptop set up properly. When I finish installing/upgrading, I'll finish this. Don Henson