How to in-place upgrade from Opensuse 12.3 to 13.1…

Following along in my line of “Readers Digest” versions of the official Opensuse upgrades procedures (here are a couple of my past ones: 11.1, 11.2, 11.4, 12.1, 12.2, 12.3) , here’s the latest for upgrading in-place from 12.3 to 13.1 (just be sure to run each of these lines one-at-a-time, not like a script):

## Check your repos. Look for anything custom, and note it for later if so...
zypper lr
# If you can, do a final update (if the repos still exist)...
zypper up
# Disable all the old repos...
zypper modifyrepo --all --disable
# Now set up the new repos for 13.1...
zypper addrepo --name "openSUSE-13.1-OSS" http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/13.1/repo/oss/ repo-13.1-oss
zypper addrepo --name "openSUSE-13.1-Non-OSS" http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/13.1/repo/non-oss/ repo-13.1-non-oss
zypper addrepo --check --refresh --name "openSUSE-13.1-Updates" http://download.opensuse.org/update/13.1/ repo-13.1-updates
zypper addrepo --check --refresh --name "openSUSE-13.1-Updates-Non-Oss" http://download.opensuse.org/update/13.1-non-oss/ repo-13.1-updates-non-oss
# Now do a refresh to update the local cache...
zypper ref
# Do a Distribution UPgrade... and I like the option to download all the packages first, before installation...
zypper dup --download "in-advance"
# Now, make a list of the old disabled repos; they might be a combination of 12.3 and 12.2 on some systems, if they weren't cleaned before...  Whoops...  ;)
zypper lr
# Remove all the old repos, for example...
zypper rr repo-12.2-non-oss repo-12.2-oss repo-12.2-update repo-12.3-non-oss repo-12.3-oss repo-12.3-updates repo-12.3-updates-non-oss repo-update-non-oss
# One more check to be sure that only 12.3 repos remain...
zypper lr
# And reboot...
init 6

Interestingly, I ran into a couple bumps in the road this time.  One of my servers ran out of space on the /boot partition, and I had to clean up some old kernel files on the fly (in the midst of the upgrade) to continue (make sure you have multiple terminal sessions during the upgrade).  I also had one that didn’t update the menu.lst file, so it booted into the old kernel after reboot.  Once i updated the file with the correct kernel info it was fine, but I thought that was odd and worthy of mentioned…

Thanks to the folks at Suse, and here’s the “long and detailed” guide that I adapted this from:
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:System_upgrade

Cool!

1 Comment

  1. Mariusz Zarzycki

    thank you, this was handy

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