I killed my Linux SuSE 9.1 :D

[Phil]

Well, actually... this thread deserves a big *rolleyes* on my behalf, but I thought this thread might prove to be quite amusing for everyone else, so sit back and enjoy my stupidity.


Some might remember my earlier problems I had with Fedora Core 4 and my Highpoint-RAID driver that didn't want to compile back in September last year.

Well, after fiddling with it for a few weeks back then, I scrapped Fedora and installed SuSE 9.1. Sure enough, everything worked fine: I was able to get my RAID going, installed the sexy Enlightenment gui, video-lan client installed, samba configured, xmms.... well, it's been working flawless to say the least... well, until last night...

The thing is, I've been trying to get PHP5 to install correctly on my SuSE 9.1 which hasn't really worked out that well. The damn thing didn't want to compile, so I downloaded some 9.3 RPMs and installed those. Sure enough, after installing Apache2-mod-php5 and restarting Apache2, it just didn't work. I gave up for a few weeks and last night, I finally sat down and decided to try again.

What always digged me is that I knew it probably had something to do with the fact that I was trying to run 9.3 php5 rpms on my 9.1 distro... and the fact that only php4 was listed in Yast2 as an installable package didn't help much either. And then I heard that php5 was added with the 9.3 distro... and I had an idea:


Funny enough, I thought I was actually being quite smart when I opened Yast2 and then changed the source of the FTP from SuSE 9.1 to 9.3......


Sure enough, upon opening the software manager, I saw the new list of packages, among them, PHP5... Woot!! I thought, to myself and a few clicks later, Yast2 was downloading 500 MB worth of updates to secure all the dependencies...

About an hour later... I restarted Apache2, open a webbrowser..... and IT WORKED!

...only to find out that a system-restart later... it probably wasn't such a good idea to mix 9.3 software & 500 MB worth of updates with my 9.1 distro...

In other words: Putty can't access my linux anymore, the bootup has a few nice lib* errors.... heck, even Yast2 doesn't start properly anymore. And enlightenment? Doesn't work either.

Ironically though... PHP5 and Apache2 work fine... *cries*


Oh well.. I guess I learned something new again. So at this point, I'm actually considering installing 9.3 or go right for SuSE 10.0. Any suggestions? At this point, I don't really have anything to loose and can only hope that I compile my hightpoint RAID driver on the newer distros.....

 

[nutball]

Oh well.. I guess I learned something new again. So at this point, I'm actually considering installing 9.3 or go right for SuSE 10.0. Any suggestions?

Well on our systems we've had generally bad experiences with SuSE x.0 releases, so we tend to wait for the x.1 before a major roll-out.

(On the other hand 'evolution' is so deeply and impressively broken in 9.3 I'm tempted to break that rule on my personal desktop! )

 

[satein]

Oh well.. I guess I learned something new again. So at this point, I'm actually considering installing 9.3 or go right for SuSE 10.0. Any suggestions? At this point, I don't really have anything to loose and can only hope that I compile my hightpoint RAID driver on the newer distros.....

I still have not try SuSE 10 yet, but both my friends who tried it out from my disk seem to be happy with it. One of them told me that you need to download some utilities on the web too since the Disk (I got from Linux Mag) doesn't give you all you want. But as far as I can say, KDE and X on SuSE 10 are speedy comparison to that of 9.x. Want to try but I cannot install it on only my lappy that hold a whole of my work .

 

[Kalin]

I'm not familiar with SUSE, but in Debian that's half the way (the correct way) to upgrade your system to a newer version of the distribution.

If SUSE's package manager is able to tell you what else can be upgraded using the new sources you could try and just go ahead with it. Again - I have no experience with SUSE, so that might not be a very good advice

 

[Phil]

I'm not familiar with SUSE, but in Debian that's half the way (the correct way) to upgrade your system to a newer version of the distribution.

If SUSE's package manager is able to tell you what else can be upgraded using the new sources you could try and just go ahead with it. Again - I have no experience with SUSE, so that might not be a very good advice

Oh... in that case it wasn't nearly as stupid thing to do that I thought to believe... well, I can confirm though that on SuSE it doesn't work too well because YAST doesn't start at all, which basically means I can't replace the newer libs with the ones from 9.1, unless I hand pick them and install them manually. Given that there were about 50 packages/libs tied to the PHP5 update, I guess I'm best off just re-installing the entire OS.

Well, I could try to load Yast2 from the SuSE 9.1. boot cd and re-install from there, but this might be a good opportunity to go all the way onto a newer distro.

From what I've heard and read the last 24 hours, it seems Suse 10.0 is not such a bad idea, so I think I'll check that one out. If I get my Highpoint RAID driver to work flawlessly, VLC, nicotine, xmms, php5/mysql/apache confirgued and working in reasonable amount of time, I guess I'm happy. I'm not going to use the desktop much anyway (it only acts as a fileserver/webserver in my lan), so I'm thinking it shouldn't be all that hard.

Can't say I'm looking forward to configuring everything to as it was before though... 8 hd drives, samba shares, crontabs.... ugh...

 

[Kalin]

You could try using yast from the command line.

Running YAST Online Update From The Command-line
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/trench/16345.html

Install Software With YAST From the Command Line
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/trench/15408.html

I don't see an option to update the whole system that way, but you could try updating yast itself, and see if that get's it working.

If that works you can upgrade further the GUI way:
System Upgrade How-To
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/11504.html

 

[Tim Murray]

emerge --update --deep world

oh god I am a horrible person for running Gentoo

 

[Kalin]

emerge --update --deep world

oh god I am a horrible person for running Gentoo

Yeah, I also find it odd that I couldn't quickly "google" a CLI way to upgrade SUSE. There might be some though, have to ask the experts.

 

[Frank]

Yes, I agree with Kalin. But then again: that's what makes Debian so great: just let apt figure it all out for you. It will work.

Well, perhaps not right away, but I have never had it break things so bad that another run couldn't fix it.

 

[Phil]

You could try using yast from the command line.

Running YAST Online Update From The Command-line
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/trench/16345.html

Install Software With YAST From the Command Line
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/trench/15408.html

I don't see an option to update the whole system that way, but you could try updating yast itself, and see if that get's it working.

If that works you can upgrade further the GUI way:
System Upgrade How-To
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/11504.html

Oh, best of thanks! I'll check it out and see if it works... I've already backed up everything though and inclined to give 10.0 a quick try, but I might just try the above to see if that gets it going for now... thanks anyway!

 

[Saem]

Easiest thing to do is dl the 9.3 full iso or the boot iso, burn it onto a disk, throw it in your suse box, boot it up, and do an upgrade. Things will be fine, plus you'll have a newer kernel.

One thing to note, SuSE is a SYSTEM, as in a whole. It's heavily tested together, but one isn't meant to mix things.

If you want to run suse 9.1 and have PHP5, you compile it separately or upgrade your SuSE distro -- that's the correct way to do things.