On Saturday 12 March 2011 21:18:43 Mike wrote:

I have an existing 11.3 install of openSUSE. I downloaded and burned the 11.4 DVD.

I would like to do a fresh install of 11.4 rather than an upgrade after reading some forum posts about this. I copied my /home directory to an external drive, including the hidden folders within my home directory.

When I install 11.4 over 11.3, do I just copy the /home directories back to the new install and my Thunderbird and Firefox information will be restored as well? Or copy just the specific (Mozilla...) folders I need from my backup? I'm afraid of losing my Thunderbird account information and Email messages during this process so I want to make sure this is the correct path to take.

I also want to make sure 11.4 installs over the old 11.3 and not one of my other partitions I use for Linux/openSUSE.

Thank you for the help. Mike

Hi Mike, In my experience, the best approach is to backup your user directory and then install the newer release fresh, 'from scratch,' allowing the installer to format '/' and '/home' in the process. Then boot the newly installed system and finish running updates and installing any additional packages, including setting up additional repositories as needed. Finally, once you've fully replicated your prior system's environment, you are then ready to migrate your user-specific data. You want to do this one application at a time, *before* launching the newer software versions. In my experience, if a package launches and discovers the user's data is stored in an earlier version's format, it will 'import' the data or 'upgrade' the stored format to make it compatible. You'll need to do a bit of research to locate where each package has stored your data. This aspect of the upgrade process is much too complex to address here. My 2 cents and YMMV, but hth & regards, Carl -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

I rather choose to have a different partition for /home folders and format only the root partition. I did't have issues with this approach, in the worst case I needed to delete the .kde4 folder. So if you simply copy your data, including .kde4 folder to some place and then copy back it should work. On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 4:18 AM, Mike <mike@chicodawg.com> wrote:

I have an existing 11.3 install of openSUSE.  I downloaded and burned the 11.4 DVD.

I would like to do a fresh install of 11.4 rather than an upgrade after reading some forum posts about this.  I copied my /home directory to an external drive, including the hidden folders within my home directory.

When I install 11.4 over 11.3, do I just copy the /home directories back to the new install and my Thunderbird and Firefox information will be restored as well?  Or copy just the specific (Mozilla...) folders I need from my backup?  I'm afraid of losing my Thunderbird account information and Email messages during this process so I want to make sure this is the correct path to take.

I also want to make sure 11.4 installs over the old 11.3 and not one of my other partitions I use for Linux/openSUSE.

Thank you for the help. Mike -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

-- Bogdan Cristea -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org