On Fri, Dec 10, 2004 at 1:51:57PM +0100, Anders Johansson wrote:
Sergio Dominguez wrote:
yes and if you have /home as separate partion that you can keep it (no format)
Some people advocate a separate partition for /usr as well, for finer control over disc cleaning during installation. My setup has /<root> and /home and /home1 (as well as swap, of course), and an embarassing number of symlinks so that huge things can live in all the extra space on /home1. I've never actually cleaned out /<root> before in all my upgrades, but this time I think I should. It's always made me a bit nervous telling Yast to format "/" when by some interpretations, that could also include "/home" and "/home1" etc. Please tell me my fears are really overblown! :) Speaking of symlinks, some of the early SuSE scripts (mkinitrd comes to mind) had trouble following symlinks. I think those problems are mostly gone now, but it's something to be aware of.
I've always wondered about that. What happens then with your configuration files? Do they get over written??
I think the details have evolved over the years, but the older SuSEconfig scripts check an MD5 hash of many of the config files and if they've been modified from the original text, they're left as is. There's some logic related to this process where the original can be moved to <filename>.rpmorig and the new gets installed, or the original can be kept and the new is deposited in its place as <filename>.rpmnew but is not installed. I don't remember all the rules that governed this process, but it seemed to make sense at the time. :) I think at the end of the installation root gets a mass mailing warning of any gotchas.
In a fresh install, yes, so you should do a backup of /etc if you want to keep them, although with a jump as large as 7.3->9.2 you probably don't want to use them, but you might want to have them around for directions when setting up the new version
Oh yes, it can be really painful to lose some carefully-crafted config file; the trick is to remember those obscure ones, especially things in dotted directories. I suppose the ideal procedure would be to back up anything at the time you modify it, and keep thorough logs of all changes to anything... I imagine a lot of things are in different places in 9.2, so it'd be asking a lot of the install process to keep old configs, so yes, best to just use them for reference.
/var might be good to back up as well, and /usr/local in case you've installed anything from source in there
It used to be that one could count on /usr/local not being disturbed during installation. But now so many things seem to end up there, I don't know if that convention still holds. Maybe it's just that I tend to install so much stuff aftermarket, from source. But at some point, the C compiler gets old, and it's important to update all the libraries in coordination with the compiler. And it's nice to get huge things like X and KDE, and that compiler, on CDs, especially if you're on dialup. So... time to spring for the latest SuSE. :) Thanks for all the feedback, guys. Jim