Upgrade to openSUSE 11.4, the risky way

Here’s a quick and dirty HOWTO about upgrading from openSUSE 11.3 to 11.4, with all additional repos enabled…

1. Switch to runlevel 3: as root, execute “init 3”
2. Login as root
3. Make a backup of all your repositories:

   cd /etc/zypp
   cp -r repos.d repos.d_11.3

4. Go through all your .repo files in /etc/zypp/repos.d and replace “11.3” with “11.4”.
   Here’s a “before/after” example:
   before: 

   [openSUSE 11.3 OSS]
   name=Haupt-Repository (OSS)
   enabled=1
   autorefresh=0
   baseurl=http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.3/repo/oss/
   path=/
   type=yast2
   keeppackages=0

   after:

   [openSUSE 11.4 OSS]
   name=Haupt-Repository (OSS)
   enabled=1
   autorefresh=0
   baseurl=http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.4/repo/oss/
   path=/
   type=yast2
   keeppackages=0

5. Refresh your repository cache:

   zypper ref

6. Upgrade zypper:

   zypper install zypper

   You have to pay attention on the list of conflicts. Generally the best of the proposed solutions is the one the would uninstall the least number of packages while still installing/upgrading what you want.

7. Do the full upgrade:

   zypper dup

   Again, pay attention to any listed conflicts, and resolve them carefully. Again, the best of the proposed solution would be the one that installs what you want while uninstalling as little as possible.

8. The scary moment:
   Reboot your system. If all went well you will be greeted by a working openSUSE 11.4 installation.
9. Cleaning up afterwards:
   Login as root, and run the following command:

   LANG=CTYPE zypper search -si | grep "(System Packages)"| cut -d "|" -f 2

   That will list all installed packages that are not available from any of the configured repositories anymore.
   You might want to carefully remove them one by one with “zypper remove”. If you use “zypper remove -u” instead, you will also remove all dependencies that are not needed anymore. This can really break things.