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  From: James Leone <linuxcpa@netscape.net>
  To  : Linuxsa <linuxsa@linuxsa.org.au>
  Date: Sun, 27 Apr 2003 22:08:25 -0700

Upgrade from SuSE 8.1 to 8.2/Review of 8.2

Ok, I am writing this whole thing to share some of my experiences with 
the upgrade, as well as my experiences with SuSe 8.2.

I hope this is helpful, but I figure if I am going to type up some 
notes, I may as well do that in an email. That way, someone else may be 
able to use the information to their benefit.

The short of it is that SuSE is very nicely set up, and the enhancements 
are noticable. However, I don't recommend doing an upgrade install.


*******************************************
Where did I start?

My system had SuSE 8.1 Professional installed with the following 
modifications:

   1. My 2.4.19 kernel modules had been deleted
   2. I brought my system back by compiling a vanilla 2.4.20 kernel from
      kernel.org and installing the 2.4.20 modules
   3. The names of the sound modules had changed between Kernel 2.4.19
      and Kernel 2.4.20, so I had to change the sound settings.
   4. To change the sound settings, I went to alsa.org and downloaded
      the latest driver set.
   5. I was not able to use the Yast2 Control Center to change sound
      settings, even though my sound cards were working perfectly
   6. My fetchmail had suddenly stopped working
   7. I had used SuSE's Linuks service to upgrade to KDE 3.1
   8. Knoda was half functional.  If I tried to create forms or reports,
      it would just crash
   9. I had Apt installed and it was working nicely
  10. I had CUPS 1.18 installed through APT
  11. My system was up to date. I had installed all of the available
      patches via SuSE's  Yast Online Update.

*********************************************************************************************


What Condition was SuSE 8.2 in after the upgrade?

The installation was broken to the point that I performed a fresh install:

   1. Yast2's sound configuration tool was still broken, but sound still
      worked
   2. Jpilot would not start, it could not find fonts
   3. Knoda was broken on dependencies, I had to uninstall it
   4. The Yast 2 control center installation module was broken.  When I
      tried to install new packages, it would first warn me that my
      storage drive was close to full. After I clicked on "ok" it would
      ask me if I wanted to abandon changes with "ok" and "cancel" as
      choices. It didn't matter which one I selected, I would be asked
      the same question. CTRL-ALT-ESC allowed me to kill the Yast2
      installation module.
   5. DosEMU was not installed
   6. Apt's sources list needed to be changed for 8.2. However, after I
      modified /etc/apt/sources.list for 8.2 and ran apt-get update,
      most of the packages I wanted to install were not available.
      Pretty bad considering that the RPM installation module was broken
      too. Kind of 'up the creek withodda paddle'.
   7. I was told that nagios-nsca was installed twice when I ran rpm -i.
      I had to remove with rpm -i nagios --nodeps, then reinstall
   8. The upgrade held my printer configurations. This has not happened
      on other SuSE upgrades.
   9. Network services and settings remained in tact.
  10. KDE kept rearanging my icons upon reboot
  11. Fetchmail worked, but spamassassin did not

I started to waste a lot of time troubleshooting. I uninstalled all of 
the Yast modules, and then reinstalled them after deleting what I 
thought were the yast configuration files. I searched for answers about 
Jpilot.   Finally I wrote SuSE support, they have not got back to me in 
4 days about the broken Yast2 installation module. They did get back to 
me about Jpilot and said that I would have to pay for that support, 
because in their opinion, it was outside the scope of my support. [1]

With all of this, I was willing to format my drive and start over again. 
However, I was not happy to have to waste 8 hours on the reinstallation 
and configuration.

As a side note, I will say that the SuSE 8.2 upgrade package selection 
module miscalculated how much space I needed, and could not install all 
of the packages even though it had calculated that I had an additional 
250MB of free space.

Also, the upgrade installation will "lock" some packages if you 
installed them as RPM's but they were not provided by SuSE.  If there is 
a conflict, it will propose a solution. However, with the application 
"locked", the only option I was proposed was to ignore and risk system 
inconsistancies.  If you cancel out and unlock the packages, you could 
still be in trouble.  After unlocking the packages,  some of the 
solutions proposed including removing 56 (fifty six) packages including 
Yast2-core and KDE3base. Most of the conflicts arose because I had 
already upgraded to KDE 3.1. I found myself in FWM at one point. :-(

All this being said, I don't think I am going to go around to each desk 
and upgrade each machine. Although I only have 6 more to do, that would 
be 48 hours of work that I can't squeeze out of my spare time.

I just wish that there was a package available that can tell you how or 
if your installation differs from the default setup.

************************************************************************************************************

How did the clean installation go?

Here are some new things that went very nicely: :-)

   1. Knoda was fully functional, it no longer crashed when I used the
      forms module
   2. The Yast 2 installation module worked fine. (Just to try to
      isolate the issue, I tested it again while the Windows fonts were
      present, and it still worked fine.)
   3. Jpilot worked just fine, until I merely copied over my Windows
      fonts. It worked fine again once I removed them.
   4. Dosemu worked fine
   5. My Compusa generic Netcamera was autodetected, and can be used if
      I merely plug in the camera into the USB port
   6. My Handspring Visor was autodetected, and was able to sync up with
      Jpilot after I merely pressed the sync button twice.
   7. I was very impressed to merely have plugged my Logitech Quickcam
      Express into the USB port and to have it work in XAWTV
      immediately. I did not have the camera plugged in during the
      installation. All I did was plug it in a few hours after the
      installation, and it worked. Very nice. I had not seen this with
      any other distribution. Mandrake 9.0 detected my compusa generic
      webcam and autodetected and configured it, but it did not pick up
      my Logitech.
   8. A Zip drive Icon appeared on my desktop a few minutes after I
      plugged it into the USB drive. This is the type of zip drive that
      gets its electricity from the computer via USB.
   9. Grub contained working entries for Windows and Linux
  10. The splash boot screen hides the messages at boot up with a very
      nice blue screen with the SuSE logo on it. F2 allows you to see
      messages. Very nice.
  11. My printer was detected and set up to print without running the
      configuration wizzard at all. I ended up changing the driver, but
      this was still very nice. Before the upgrade, print jobs to our
      Konica Copier/Fax/Printer would show up as size A4, even though
      the Yast settings said letter. However, this is no longer a
      problem. Note that there was not a problem with the other two
      printers. The configuration wizzard made a query and a printer I
      think once, so I was momentarily confused because I was not used
      to seeing a queue and printer.
  12. My monitor was detected and set up very nicely by default.
      However, it picked too large of a resolution, and was a bit off
      center. I also have a Thinkpad, and it did that there too.
  13. I was asked if I wanted to update packages before the installation
      had finished, but after I entered the network settings. It updated
      the packages a lot quicker than in SuSE 8.1. YOU is as nice as it
      was in 7.1, fast & reliable.
  14. Although I do not use DHCP here, I was able to tell that SuSE
      8.2's installation will autoconfigure the network connection with
      DHCP. BeOS is a bit better, it can tell that DHCP will not work
      and assign an unused IP number. However, it will not set up our
      differently numbered gateway and obviously external DNS numbers.[2]
  15. Fetchmail worked as expected
  16. The bootloader configurator seemed 'less brainless.' I thought
      their changes took the bootloader module a small step backwards.
  17. Compupic will not run. It will error out with the message
      "segmentation fault." Strace showed an error with
      /lib/id-linux.so.2 just before it crashed.
  18. The new Xfree4.3 seems to provide a performance boost. It system
      seems to run faster and smoother.
  19. The Yast2 sound configurator worked perfectly and the audio
      recordings I took did not have the slight, high pitched distortion
      that seems to be discussed at Linuxsa from time to time.  I did
      have to download and install lame and mp3info from sources outside
      of SuSE.
  20. During the installation it asked if I wanted to integrate the
      workstation into the LAN with NIS, LDAP or NIS+.  I didn't know
      what all that meant, but I mention it because its new.
  21. Although no different from SuSE 8.1, I had to enable sound in
      DOSEMU by editing /etc/dosemu.conf as root to read (speaker =
      "native") and (Sound="on") to be able to hear the Leisure Suit
      Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizzards theme song come up when
      the game started.
  22. Winex3 was not able to install America Online 5.0. I left a post
      at Transgaming, and a solution was provided in about a day:
      http://www.transgaming.com/showthread.php?news=67

Overall a very nice distribution, with very nice features.

James Leone



[1] I have since solved this. The mere presence of Windows fonts in 
/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/local/ causes Jpilot to leave this message: 
 "No fonts found; this probably means that the fontconfig library is not 
correctly configured. You may need to edit the fonts.conf configuration 
file. More information about fontconfig can be found in the 
fontconfig(3) manual page on http://fontconfig.org. " This message was a 
time drain. No fonts.conf file was present in /etc. I found one in 
/etc/fonts, but the damn thing was written in a programming language. 
 Fontconfig.org appeared to be more of a page with trivial information, 
and I saw nothing there that appeared to point me to a man page, and I 
ran out of patience. I found out what the problem was on the subsequent 
reinstall. I tested Jpilot just prior to adding Windows fonts, and say 
that it was broken up until I removed them.
What is annoying about this is that SuSE states in its upgrade notes 
that it changed the font configuration between 8.1 and 8.2. Obviously, 
whatever they did, broke Jpilot if Windows fonts are installed. I have 
no idea why they wanted me to pay them to figure out how they screwed 
things up.

[2] I was also surprised to find out the other day that someone named 
Ingo  BeOS




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