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On Monday, December 05, 2011 01:41 PM Greg Freemyer wrote:
On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 10:55 AM, Roger Oberholtzer <roger@opq.se> wrote:
I would like to install 12.1 on a spare partition in a rather quick manner (meaning little down time for the existing 11.2 system - 12.1 can still take a while to be ready). I would imagine I could install 12.1 from, say, the KDE live CD. Then, boot in to my old 11.2 partition, and then chroot (mounting /proc and all as one does) into the new 12.1 partition and continue adding packages and whatever with zypper? Any gottchas? Perhaps installing something with kernel modules might fail if the install wants to load them. Might I expect any other problems that would make this a painful approach?
Yours sincerely,
Roger Oberholtzer
OPQ Systems / Ramböll RST
Roger,
Is it feasible to setup your new partition as the OS drive for a virtual machine, then do the full install at whatever pace it needs. (Hours and/or days).
Then once your happy with the new installation, convert it to a normal physical install?
(I have not done this myself, but it seems fairly straight-forward.)
Roger, I've done as Greg suggested many times. And especially if you already have an easy vm setup like VBox, this can be a good "quick-n-dirty" way to test. The downside to be aware of is that in a vm (varies by which one) some of the hardware is abstracted rather than directly accessed, and hence the installation will "see" not the real hardware but what the vm mgr presents to it, and not use the drivers or kernel modules a real install would. You may encounter this with your graphics, audio, network, etc. A specific example, my system has a on-board jmicron controller for handling IDE, since the chipset only handles SATA. With a VBox or VMware vm, the hard disk is actually just a file on disk; the vm mgr's controller will be something like an ICH6. But the real jmicron controller requires its own kernel module to be loaded from the initrd. Consequently, in this case the vm install does not reveal that the jmicron module will be required if an IDE hard disk is being used nor if the optical drive is IDE rather than SATA. You can give this a try, just be aware that when you go to do the real install, you may encounter something that the vm install did not. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org