On Sat, Sep 10, 2005 at 12:56:42PM +0200, Aschwin Marsman wrote:

Hi,

Two days ago I asked a similar question on the SUSE english mailing list but go no reply so far.

Is it possible to upgrade SUSE 8.1 to e.g. SUSE 10.0 by only installing rpm packages?

Technicaly? Yes. A new instalation will however give you much more free time. If you don't have a seperate /home partition, this is the moment.

So I don't want to boot from e.g. a cdrom because the machine is located in a remote location and I only have ssh access to that machine.

The changes will include a new kernel, so a reboot will be needed. If anything goes wrong, you still need physical access.

Is there a difference between a distribution upgrade using YAST or by installing the correct rpm's?

Yes. Yast should be a lot easier, as it does several checks for you.

Is the upgrade software doing things that are not in rpm packages?

No idea, but normally the rpm's you would use with rpm are the same as those you would use with Yast.

I know this would be a giant step, I will test it thouroughly on a local machine before doing it remote, I only want to know if it's possible at all.

Technicaly it is possible. Wether or not it is worth your time is another question. The best way to do this (I think) is to use apt and see if that does a reasonably well update. Again, I would advice against it. People have noticed that updates went well, only to notice problems later on. It all depends probably also on how standard your machine is. -- houghi http://www.opensuse.org/index.php/Making_a_DVD_from_CDs

On Saturday 10 September 2005 5:56 am, Aschwin Marsman wrote:

Hi,

Two days ago I asked a similar question on the SUSE english mailing list but go no reply so far. There is a thread there from someone who did this in the last 2 weeks.

Is it possible to upgrade SUSE 8.1 to e.g. SUSE 10.0 by only installing rpm packages? Possible? Yes. That is a large difference that really should not be attempted on a remote machine. Test this several times.

So I don't want to boot from e.g. a cdrom because the machine is located in a remote location and I only have ssh access to that machine. Then you do NOT want to do this. Even a SUSE 8.1 to 8.2 upgrade is risky but you are attempting a very large change here.

If you have the JFS file system on the boot disk then you really don't want to do this. Check all the release notes on all the SUSE versions for these types of show stoppers.

Is there a difference between a distribution upgrade using YAST or by installing the correct rpm's? They are about the same _IF_ everything is applied correctly and without any dependency issues.

Is the upgrade software doing things that are not in rpm packages? Yes.

I know this would be a giant step, I will test it thouroughly on a local machine before doing it remote, I only want to know if it's possible at all. It is possible but the chances of failure are very good. Make sure your test machine is exactly the same hardware and software so you know what problems you will run into.

Have a nice weekend,

Aschwin Marsman

Best of luck, Stan

Aschwin Marsman <aschwin@marsman.org> writes:

Hi,

Two days ago I asked a similar question on the SUSE english mailing list but go no reply so far.

Is it possible to upgrade SUSE 8.1 to e.g. SUSE 10.0 by only installing rpm packages?

You should use yast to do that since there a small number of upgrade fixes in YaST that are not in the packages. Note that an update from 8.1 to 10.0 has not been tested by us, our main focus is on testing the previous release. Updating from earlier releases should work but we did not test it (if bugs were reported for it during the beta phase, those would have been fixed in general), Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, aj@suse.de, http://www.suse.de/~aj SUSE Linux Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126