On Sat, 2 Feb 2008, Henry Lafleur wrote:-
Hello all,
What exactly does this mean, "not supported?" (reference http://en.opensuse.org/Updating_SUSE_Linux )
Not supported, as in you won't get support from Novell if things break. That doesn't mean that it's not possible to do.
5.0->5.2->6.0->6.2->7.2 (I reinstalled 9.0 because I had the Ximian Gnome disk on top of 7.2 and that did some weird stuff.)
This sort of upgrade would be unsupported with openSUSE although, using the present and previous versions as an example, if you had 10.2 installed, upgrading to 10.3 is "supported". Going from 10.1 to 10.3, most likely will work, but will probably require some effort. If you go from 10.0 to 10.3, it will require even more effort[0], and starting 9.3 or earlier, would require a lot of effort[1].
So besides the possibility of minor inconveniences such as what I saw with Red Hat, what exactly is so terrible about upgrading Suse to make it not recommended and not supported?
Some people don't recommend it because they've have bad problems with it. Others, because it leaves behind a variety of no longer used files, clogging up places like /etc .
If I do a full system backup prior, can't I just do a tar to restore my system back (as I did before when my HD crashed)?
You could use the SUSE backup tool in YaST. As to what it backs up, I don't know. I've not had a really bad experience with an upgrade where I've needed to restore from backup.
Are lawyers making you say this or something?
I wouldn't think so. The page you refer to on en.opensuse.org is hosted on the openSUSE wiki, and virtually anyone could have created or edited it. BTW, this would probably been better on the main openSUSE mailing list rather than here. You'd get many more points of view there, and probably several detailed experiences as well. [0] Yes, I've done that upgrade, twice in fact. I even blogged about it here: <URL:http://www.davjam.org/lifetype/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=16&blogId=1> <URL:http://www.davjam.org/lifetype/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=20&blogId=1> [1] And that was really a lot of "fun" to do: <URL:http://www.davjam.org/lifetype/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=17&blogId=1> <URL:http://www.davjam.org/lifetype/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=18&blogId=1> <URL:http://www.davjam.org/lifetype/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=19&blogId=1> Regards, David Bolt -- Team Acorn: http://www.distributed.net/ OGR-P2 @ ~100Mnodes RC5-72 @ ~15Mkeys SUSE 10.1 32bit | openSUSE 10.2 32bit | openSUSE 10.3 32bit | openSUSE 11.0a1 SUSE 10.1 64bit | openSUSE 10.2 64bit | openSUSE 10.3 64bit RISC OS 3.6 | TOS 4.02 | openSUSE 10.3 PPC |RISC OS 3.11 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org