Upgrading from OpenSuse 10.3 to 11.2 (new installation)

The change went fine. This post is a personal placeholder for installation instructions for OpenSuSE 11.2, which might be useful.

Dual boot and multi/boot

This computer has two versions of windows XP next to SuSE 10.3. Only the linux installation is replaced without partitioning or breaking the boot. The following describes some steps to avoid problems before the installation.

• Open YaST and from the partition tool write down the relevant information (partitions, file-system and mount-points). In this case

  /dev/sda1 NTFS C
  /dev/sda2 NTFS D
  /dev/sda3 (extended partition)
  /dev/sda5 swap
  /dev/sda6 EXT3 /
  /dev/sda7 EXT3 /home
  /dev/sda8 FAT32
  ...

  Be careful not to change anything!

• Check in YaST how the boot is configured and write it down. Understand where the bootloader is installed. In my case grub was in the master boot record (MBR). The default grub entry starts Suse 10.3 (root=/dev/sda6) and one other starts the NT/XP bootloader installed in /dev/sda2 (which selects which XP to start).

• During installation OpenSuSE 11.2 automatically proposed a configuration which did not change the windows partitions but modified the mountpoints of the linux partitions. I decided to keep the old partitions and manually change the proposal to have the table look like the original one (using the above listed mountpoints). The linux partitions / and /home were reformatted to EXT4 (the standard fs in the latest distributions). EXT4 had to be explicitly requested when doing the manual adjustments!

• Finally, the suggested place for the bootloader (grub) was not the master boot record (MBR) but with a click it was easy to enable installation in the MBR.

All the changes were easy with the installation interface of OpenSuSE 11.2. This was a bit surprising, since experience taught me never to use the latest version before it's fixed. Installation went well, the bootloader works fine. However, grub detected the two XPs and created two entries for windows, one I must remove because I have them set up to boot from only one partition. So far so good.

Wrong keyboard layout

Even if a portuguese keyboard was chosen at installation, KDE was by default using the US keyboard. To solve the problem to "System settings -> Regional and language -> Keyboard layout". Enable keyboard layouts and drag the layout of your keyboard from "available layouts" to "active layouts". Finally either press the up arrow to make this the default layout or move the wrong layout back to available layouts (simpler and you avoid a layout icon in the panel). Press "Apply".

Microphone default setup

See this post