Friedrich Dimmling <f.dimmling@snafu.de> writes:

Couriosity overriding the caveat 'Never touch a running system' I have ordered a copy of SuSE 8.1 Pro.

Now my question: Can I install the 8.0 packages e.g. for xcin, cjk-latex, the unicode support for LaTeX and Gnu Emacs, Emacs unicode font and the Archic TTFs (for Chinese) on the 8.1 system

Most likely yes for all of them. Certainly no problem for the Arphic fonts the efont-unicode fonts and latex-ucs. These are architecture independent packages anyway (i.e. they don't contain binaries compiled for a specific platform). Architecture independent programs will certainly continue work unless some directory structure or interface to other programs has changed (which is not the case). cjk-latex ist mostly architecture independent as well, it contains only a few architecture dependent binaries which are not always needed (e.g. /usr/bin/hbf2gf). xcin is a binary program (But xcin is already included in SuSE Linux 8.1 anyway!). And even binary programs from old distributions usually continue to work. Changes in libraries like glibc are usually backwards compatible and obsolete libraries are usually included in compatibility packages like 'compat' mfabian@gregory:~$ rpm -ql compat-2002.8.15-19 /usr/lib/libdb-3.1.so /usr/lib/libdb-3.3.so /usr/lib/libg++-1.so.2 [...] in order to keep old binaries running. Even very old binary only packages like Netscape 4.7x still work, i.e. in 99% of the cases old programs just continue to work. Therefore, don't click on the "Delete unmaintained packages" button during the upgrade, just keep the old stuff and replace only what doesn't work.

or shall I wait for new packages to come? I mostly use CJK LaTeX with Gnu Emacs, OpenOffice and KMail with xcin.

Of course, as usual, everything will be available in the FTP version of SuSE Linux 8.1, but it will probably still take a while until the SuSE Linux 8.1 FTP version is released. Until then, if you miss something and older packages don't work anymore, tell me and I'll upload the SuSE Linux 8.1 versions to FTP. -- Mike Fabian <mfabian@suse.de> http://www.suse.de/~mfabian 睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。