On Friday 08 September 2006 16:54, Basil Chupin wrote:

So, basically, "I pays me money and I takes me chances" :-) . But if I strike a lucky streak I will have whatever I download and install upgraded in the normal way (by zmd or smart or whatever). Have I read you correctly? :-) .

You can upgrade to the FACTORY distribution using zmd. However, do not get into this until you fully understand that you lose you rights to complain about anything :-) (not that you had such rights before :-) ) This is alpha software, brokeness is a normal condition. However, this is the thing to have if you want to help out, report bugs, test stuff. For example, I have it on my work desktop, I reinstall it cleanly after every alpha (that means once a month), those very broken I update to FACTORY.

Andreas Jaeger wrote:

Basil Chupin writes:

...

So, basically, "I pays me money and I takes me chances" :-) . But if I strike a lucky streak I will have whatever I download and install upgraded in the normal way (by zmd or smart or whatever). Have I read

Upgrade using yast - boot from CD1 and choose "update". Or use the factory tree to update any time you like...

...

you correctly? :-) .

Hope so, Andreas

Thanks Andreas. Cheers. -- This computer is environment-friendly and is running on OpenSuSE 10.1

David Bolt wrote:

On Fri, 8 Sep 2006, Basil Chupin wrote:-

...

Could someone please provide the answer to this question: if I was to download the ISOs for Alpah4 would I expect to have this alpha progressively upgraded in the same way as an official release to ultimately become Alpha 5 or Beta1 and so on until it becomes the official release 10.2?

So far[0] that's the method I've been using. To date, the only times where I've needed fresh installs have been the initial 10.2alpha1 and where the upgrade failed on a virtual machine. In the latter case, I needed to install on real hardware due to alpha3 and alpha4 both failing to install.

...

Or would I have to download a complete alpha5 ISOs or beta1 et alia if I wanted to keep up with the progress in 10.2?

You can download the delta.isos and use applydeltaiso[1] to build the full images. Present difference is 3.3GB for the alpha4 ISOs and 507MB for the alpha3->alpha4 deltas.

The only thing you'll need to do is make sure you keep a copy if the previous ISO images so you can recreate the newer images. It may be possible, although I haven't tested this as yet, to use a /dev/cdrom as the old ISO in place of an image file.

[0] through 10.0 betas, 10.1 alphas and betas and, with the exceptions above the 10.2 alphas.

[1] installed as a part of the deltarpm package. Command used is:

applydeltaiso

Regards, David Bolt

Thank you for this most valuable information! Duly saved, and printed for future reference. Cheers. -- This computer is environment-friendly and is running on OpenSuSE 10.1