Eric,
Thanks for your reply. My setup is the server for our home network.
It's hooked up to a cable modem, so the connection is fast. For about a
year and a half, I've had two 9gig seagate scsi full-height hard drives for
the machine. But since only one fits into my midsize case, I only run one
at a time. When I upgraded from SuSE 6.something to 7.0, I just unplugged
one drive, plugged in the other, and did a clean install. Then when I went
from 7.0 to 7.3, I reversed the process. Having a "backup" drive with a
working network setup on it helped keep my home users happy while I
upgraded.
A few weeks ago I burned a copy of Caldera OpenLinux server to try out
on the unused drive. I couldn't get it to install, so after I posted my
message about upgrading my 7.3 system to 8.0 using apt-get, I thought I
might as well lay a new copy of 7.3 down on that hard drive and try to do an
upgrade from there.
It was time consuming, but interesting. First I wanted to get the "new"
7.3 installed as close to my current setup as possible, plus make some
"improvements", like be sure to uncheck the ISDN stuff, as well as the
laptop power stuff, so I don't have to scroll through a lot of useless crap
when editing rc.config. And skip personal firewall and ipchains in favor of
SuSEfirewall2 and iptables, add in snort, evolution in gnome, and a few
other things.
It took several tries just to get 7.3 installed. And I still made some
mistakes. Since 6.3 I haven't been able to use a graphic installer. It
locks up the machine. That was true for 6.3 and 7.0 and 7.3 on a
cyrix-233/Abit motherboard setup, and it has been just as true for 7.3 on
the current Pentium II 400/I forget motherboard system. Only the text
installer works. But of course I had to test it to find out. Also I set up
the drive with a small /boot partition, and all the rest behind /. But I
didn't know how much space to allot for the boot partition, and it took two
or three tries before I left enough space. And you don't know if there's
not enough until the install is almost done. Saturday night I went to bed
with the install still going, expecting to have to respond to on-screen
prompts when I got up Sunday. But there was a power outage during the
night, so Sunday morning I started over. Within a couple of hours I had a
working system, the network connections were up and running, I downloaded
and installed teh apt-get components, and started the process.
One change I wanted to make between the "old" 7.3 and the "new" was to
change from reiserfs to ext3 on the largeer part of the hard drive. I
don't know what happened, but somehow it didn't take. So when the installed
7.3 system booted up, it gave a message that said it couldn't find an ext3
module. And based on what happened after a couple of inadvertent
shutdowns, it's clear that I have an 8 gig ext2 system in place. I'm still
trying to get an ext2 module working.
Other than that it actually seems to be an 8.0 system, with a 2.4.18
kernel. Issues: no sound. I have an interwave-stb sound card that works
under 7.3 (installed with yast2 rather than with alsaconf, which didn't
work). Yast2 didn't get upgraded, and then when it did, I had only some of
the compenents. Sound support was missing, along with the abiltiy to edit
the configuration file (which is in itself a heck of a lot shorter than it
was under 7.3). I had do to several "updates" with apt-get, naming specific
components, to get them added. I still haven't been able to get my stb
interwave sound card to work. My HP Deskjet 600 doesn't work. It worked
locally under the old 7.3, but not from remote machines (it did at one time,
then that functionality was lost somehow, then I got it back, and now it's
gone again).
I found I didn't have gnome. So I downloaded it, but when I ran it,
there was no mozilla, evolution, gimp, or gnumeric. I've had to download
the rpms for each of those individually. And then there are often companion
files that are held back, that also have to be downloaded and installed
individually.
But you know, now I'm at the point where I'm thinking, why don't I keep
the old 7.3 for backup, and just keep on using this new 8.0 system? The
reason for going back to the old 7.3 and upgrading *it* as well is that I
had been using it for file storage from the various windows machines around
the house, so there are all of these files on it that I wouldn't want to
use. But I can always hook that drive back up, offload the files to some
other machine, and then go back to the "new" 8.0. .
I thank you again for your response, I will look over the information
carefully, and keep on running apt-get until I seem to have everything I
need. I just hope I can get my printer running, and get remote printing
under samba to work. Then it will be time to order pro-office (another
reason for going to 8.0!)
Stan Koper
----- Original Message -----
From: "Eric Maryniak"
Hi,
I saw on the apt4rpm site a suggestion that one might upgrade to SuSE 8.0 from an earlier version. I have 7.3, and was wondering if anyone has tried this?
I did a regular update, and I didn't take the ximian out of the list, which may be why I've lost my icons in gnome (or maybe not).
Thanks,
Stan Koper
Yes, I did a successfull 'upgrade', however I would note:
a) you need a really _fast_ internet connection, a lot of packages,
in the 800+ in my case, get updated
b) you need to redo it a couple of times (sorta incremental process,
and sometimes apt-get crashes, or rather rpm -U on memory shortage)
c) a lot of configuration files in /etc are changed and you will need
to redo edits (watch for .rpmsave and .rpmnew files), so it's a good
idea to backup /etc (at the very least) first.
d) some packages will give problems by appearing 'double' in the list:
remove (rpm -e) them first, i.e. 'manually'.
e) rebuild/reinstall your kernel (mk_initrd, lilo, you know the dance;
with the newer lilo I had to explicitly set a 'linear' option or else
lilo would not boot, L 02 02 ... errors, note that /boot is usually in
the first (at < 1023) cylinders
f) it's not for the end-user: be prepared for manual after-cleanup!
it's best to do it on a 'toy' machine first and definitely _not_ on
a production server
My /etc/apt/sources.list is (stay away from Gnome, Ximian etc. unless you
need to):
---cut---
# SuSE 8.0 (on 7.3!).
rpm ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt SuSE/8.0-i386 security
rpm ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt SuSE/8.0-i386 base
rpm ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt SuSE/8.0-i386 update
rpm ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt SuSE/8.0-i386 kde
rpm ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt SuSE/8.0-i386 mozilla
rpm ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt SuSE/8.0-i386 extra
---cut---
Good luck, bye--Eric
--
Eric Maryniak