On Wednesday 01 June 2005 12:34 pm, Jon Nelson wrote:
I don't have to upgrade a running system. If I could do a diskless (no CD,DVD, or floppy) upgrade that would really be ideal. There are many machines that don't have any of those items. As for "It is /always/ better to upgrade a non-running system." (emphasis mine) that's an absolute and I'm quite sure isn't always true - there may be many times when upgrading while running (even in runlevel 1 or 2) may be preferable to attempting to do an upgrade of a non-booted system.
I have a small sony Viao laptop (PCG-505G) that doesn't have floppy, cdrom, or bootable usb, network. It has a very small HD (about 4 gig I think) and my only option to install on this is pulling the HD out and copying the CD's to it. I tried installing with HD in a different machine and ran into trouble when the hardware changed. SuSEPluger (or whatever) didn't catch all the changes. I then ran into this problem mentioned here thinking that using the Upgrade link pointing to a nfs share would install the newer 9.3 and let the hardware be re-detected. That didn't happen the first time. I re-ran again, and it seemed to work (mostly). I would agree that it would be nice to be able to do a clean install from nfs. Something to the effect of wiping out HD, and installing just what is needed to access the nfs share and install from scratch that way.... my 2 cents FWIW B-)