On Monday, December 05, 2011 10:55 AM Roger Oberholtzer 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
I do both a test fresh install as well as a test upgrade simulation on other separate partitions, with every new release. First, I would not use the Live-CD. In the past, I've gotten unexpected results installing from it compared to the DVD. With 12.1 that may not happen, but IMO and IME the DVD is safer. This is especially true if you have other OS's on the machine, in particular Windows. But I have run into other issues in the past too, due to there being less on the CD. Second, you want to be particularly careful with the Boot Loader step. Again, I haven't tried the Live-CD for installation in a while, so frankly I don't remember how much flexibility it provides. But for sure with the DVD, you can enter the Boot Loader dialogue step and, at the minimum, make sure that grub is only installed to the boot sector of the partition you are installing to. If you are comfortable with grub, you can remove all grub installation and take care of that later from your 11.2 production instance. Either way, you are assured that your 11.2 will continue to control booting the machine. Third, in your 11.2 production instance, you need to set up booting the 12.1 partition. There are number of different ways to do this, depending on whether you installed grub to the 12.1 boot sector. If you did, in YaST Boot Loader you can ask it (lower right) to generate a new configuration; if it works right it will find 12.1 and create a "chainloader" stanza in /boot/grub/menu.lst for booting 12.1. Or, if you know the grub syntax, you can add that stanza yourself manually with a text editor as root. With this method, grub in 11.2 is handing off boot control to grub in 12.1, and so the menu.lst file in both installs is being used. Or, if you did not install grub at all with 12.1, you can add a standard "root, "kernel", and "initrd" stanza to your 11.2 menu.lst that will directly boot 12.1. (I don't recall if YaST will suggest this for you as described above, but it's harmless to check.) So with this method grub in 12.1 is not being used at all, and so the 12.1 menu.lst as well is not used. Since I leave my 2 test partitions in place all the time, I find it easiest to just control everything from my single production install. That is, I do not use the chainloader method because a standard boot stanza from the production menu.lst works fine and then I only have to make changes to a single menu.lst. At the same time, I have a 3rd partition which is a backup mirror of my production install; since I use it as a failover it must be bootable by itself and therefore for it I use the chainloader method. You can now boot into 12.1 and use it however you wish, no need for mount -- bind, chroot, etc. You have a fully working 12.1 for clean simulation. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org