I have a main system with kde 3.1 that came with suse 8.2 and a laptop with exactly the same and use NFS to give the same desktop and home directory.

The next step is to fully evaluate kde 3.2 on my laptop before upgrading the main system

...how best to aproach this please? Can I just upgrade my laptop without risking my 3.1 system settings and still have the same desktop and home directory?

Basically, you could simply do a backup of /opt/kde3 and ~/.kde (of all users (are there any other user specific dirs?) before installing 3.2, an if you don't like it, restore the 3.1 backup. If you want to be able to switch between the versions, this is how it could work: init 3 cd /opt mv kde3 kde3.1 rpm -Uvh mv kde3 kde3.2 and create a softlink to one of the installation trees, depending on what you want to use: ln -sf kde3.2 kde3 or ln -sf kde3.1 kde3 and finally init 5 You could do the same with the ~/.kde tree in all home dir's. Mario