kontrawize

Updated openSUSE 10.2 to 10.3 under VMware Server 1.0.4 (a bit of a tale)

I hesitated on upgrading my openSUSE 10.2 VMware virtual machine to 10.3, because it is the system on which I do most of my work, so I can't afford to have any significant down-time with it. However, there weren't a lot of new issues on the openSUSE newsgroups , so I thought it might be safe now.

Initially, the upgrade went OK. As usual for an openSUSE upgrade in a VMware virtual machine, you do it in text mode, and you don't test the internet connection or select any options that require network access. However, openSUSE 10.3 won't install unless your boot partition (if you have a separate "/boot" partition like I do) is at least 64M, so I had to use a bootable "gparted" CD to increase my boot partition's size by taking some of the space from the adjacent swap partition. Also, during the set-up phase of the update, I had to agree to remove some packages (e.g. Firefox and Java 6) to make the package manager happy. I made a note to re-install these later.

After the upgrade finished, I ran "vmware-config-tools.pl" to rebuild the VMware tools (has to be done whenever the kernel version changes). This is needed to get network connectivity in the virtual machine, among other things. After installation, I removed obviously out-of-date software repositories from my list of repositories (using YaST), did an online registration (to get the details for the appropriate online update repository), and then added my favourite repositories. Then I ran the online update. It told me to reboot, so I did.

Unfortunately, after the reboot, my windowing system wouldn't start. Running "yast2" and redoing the display settings didn't help, so I re-ran the openSUSE 10.3 upgrade, this time not adding extra repositories until after the initial online update had been completed. Quite a number of package dependencies couldn't be satisfied, especially packages that were part of the GNOME desktop. For the most part, I set the package manager to ignore those dependency issues, hoping that I would get it all resolved later.

In retrospect, perhaps I should have just disabled the extra repositories and just have re-run the online update, but I didn't think of that at the time. That said, re-running the openSUSE 10.3 updater on a system that already has 10.3 restored is pretty quick. Unfortunately, the re-installation didn't help, I still couldn't get my windowing system running.

So, I went in and disabled all repositories except the installation disk and the main update site, and re-ran the online update using "yast2" in text mode, and then rebooted as instructed. I then re-ran "vmware-config-tools.pl", and rebooted.

No luck. Using "vmware-config-tools.pl" to change the screen resolution (from 1280x800 to 800x600) also didn't help. At this stage I had to give up. The screen had been OK before my original online update, so I restored my openSUSE 10.2 VMware virtual machine from my backup, and started the update all over again.

During this, I noted that VMware Tools was doing something in "/usr/X11R6/bin", where the only file by default is "xauth". VMware tools seemed to expect to find "X" there. After a quick search, I found that some other tools are fooled by this, and the suggestion is to do

ln -s /usr/bin/Xorg /usr/X11R6/bin/X

In addition, I also did

ln -s /usr/bin/Xorg /usr/X11R6/bin/Xorg

This certainly fixed the minor issue with "vmware-config-tools.pl", but after rebooting again, the windowing system was still crashing as before.

So, I ran the online update utility in text mode, and found there were outstanding updates. I decided to keep updating (and re-running "vmware-config-tools.pl" in the case of a kernal update) until there were no more updates left. I should mention that there was (and is) a network issue. My experience of recent openSUSE upgrades is that network device information doesn't get carried over correctly, and needs to be fixed. However, I couldn't get the network to start working by itself on boot-up. Even now, I can only get it to work by running the following script (as root or using "sudo"):

#!/bin/bash
/etc/init.d/network stop
/sbin/rmmod pcnet32
/sbin/rmmod vmxnet
/sbin/depmod -a
/sbin/modprobe vmxnet
/etc/init.d/network start

Anyway, installing all of the online updates didn't fix things. I used YaST's "Software Management" app to select all packages with "xorg" in the name (X-Windows), and tried updating those again. A quick Web search showed that X.org 7.3 is available (7.2 ships with openSUSE 10.3), so I found the openSUSE repository for version 7.3 of X-windows

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/xorg73/openSUSE_10.3/

I added it as a repository, and then did yet another online update of the installed "xorg-*" packages. That worked!

With that major problem over, I added my favourite repositories (Packman, GNOME stable, OpenOffice, etc.) and updated with no problems. The update is done, but that X.org problem almost had me reverting to openSUSE 10.2. It's a pity these things can't run more smoothly, but it's done now, I can just get on with things.

Finding software for openSUSE

openSUSE Linux doesn't have the “apt-get” command that users of Debian Linux and its derivatives provide as a simple mechanism to download some application that you've heard of, but don't have installed. However, it isn't hard to find most things that you might want for openSUSE, it's just that the process is different.

The best place to start is http://software.opensuse.org/. You can download openSUSE from here, but you can also find applications that you need for your openSUSE installation. In the left-hand column are the “Software” links. The Software Search link returns a list of URLs for repositories that contain the application that you want, while the other “Software” links take you to lists of repositories. In both cases, you need to add the repository or repositories that you need to your list of openSUSE sources.

To do this, start YaST, then from the “Software” group select “Installation Source” (openSUSE 10.2 or earlier) or “Software Repositories” (openSUSE 10.3 or later). Press “Add”, then “Specify URL...”, and then paste in the repository URL that you found earlier. Once you have done this, you can use YaST's “Software Management” to locate and install the software that you want from the repository that you have added.

You rarely have to add new repositories once you have added a few, as each contains many packages. So, this isn't something that you will need to do every time you are looking for a new application, but you will have to do it sometimes.

I hope that helps, if you have been looking for software for openSUSE.