Live upgrade from openSUSE 11.0 to 11.2

Article update: it turns out many people come here hoping to find a solution and are disappointed to find only problems that I encountered.. Sorry, that's too bad. Until someone figures out a way to do it online, your best option is to boot off the Network installation CD (100MB).

On Saturday I upgraded my wife's laptop from openSUSE 11.0 to 11.2 RC. I did it using zypper dup, and there were some problems so here I describe them for the benefit of others who might try the same.

1. Edited /etc/zypp/repos.d/* to replace all 11.0 occurences with 11.2. It worked also for Packman and Videolan.
2. zypper in zypper offered a suspiciously large update. It turned out it wanted to switch from x86_64 to i586, boo! The fix was zypper in zypper.x86_64\>1
3. That did not go well. It installed the new rpm.rpm and then repo2solv failed, terminating the transaction. After that, I had the old libzypp and the new zypper, not working. So I manually downloaded the libraries and installed them using rpm, ignoring the broken dependencies for the yast2-* packages.
4. Changed commit.downloadMode to DownloadInHeaps in /etc/zypp/zypp.conf, which exists primarily to avoid the previous problem. But Murphy does know when to strike.
   
5. zypper dup

Note that from 11.1 to 11.2, I used the live upgrade method without such problems. But for 11.0, you may be better off booting from an installation disc.

The suse-ncc User

Got a question about the purpose of suse-ncc:x:106:110:Novell Customer Center User:/var/lib/YaST2/suse-ncc-fakehome:/bin/bash, and Google did not know, so I asked the usual suspects.

Answer: It comes from yast2-registration.rpm and is used to switch away from root when we spawn the web browser and let you register your SUSE Linux Enterprise product.

Thanks, mc.