I just got finished installing OpenSuSE 10.2 on my Linux workstation. It had been at 10.0. Overall, it is very painless. It's a lot easier than installing Windows.
The motivator was multi-fold. First, there was the DST patch. I could have just fixed the tz file, but it has been a while since I did a general upgrade and that gave me a motivating date. So finally, I downloaded the Open DVD, burned the DVD on my windows system, copied all 40GB of stuff over to another disk, rebuild, and restored 40GB. This took about a week since it had to be done in my free time (which has been very limited).
Pretty much everything worked. All sorts of little things have been fixed. For example, my HP Photosmart printer support is now supported properly by OpenSuSE instead of having to be manually downloaded and installed by me. There were only two minor problems:
1) The Canon i9100 support was a trickier install. I need the Canon for the ledger size printing. Canon will not disclose details for open source drivers, so I purchased the Linux driver from turboprint. It's install is a tiny bit incompatible. I found that what you need to do is install the turboprint software, install the license, but do not use it to create the printer queues. Instead, use YAST2 to set up the queues. YAST2 recognizes the new capabilities once the turboprint software is installed and creates printer queues properly. (There must be some oddity about file locations, or the like.)
2) The default automounting for the iPod is not right. I need to fix that. Right now it is getting mounted usable by root only. But gtkpod now deals with it just fine out of the DVD with no tweaking needed by me.
The other key to a good transition is having all the configuration files, mail directories, etc. over in your home directory, create a new user with the same uid, and restore the old stuff. I didn't lose anything this time.
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