Upgrade SUSE Linux 10.0 to 11.1 on a Samsung X20 XVM 1730 V with Intel GMA900

The upgrade process

As there are no updates for 10.0 any more, I decided to try an upgrade installation using a SUSE 11.1 DVD that came with some computer magazine.

Preparations

As I was already using a 11.0 on my desktop, I've copied all repository files under /etc/zypp/repos.d from my desktop to the laptop and changed "11.0" to "11.1" in all of them.
10.0 didn't have zypper yet, so I simply created the directory.

Booting the 11.1 DVD and choosing the upgrade installation method I was told that the /etc/fstab used the device name scheme (like /dev/sda1) and that this was not safe as device names may not be fixed.
So I booted the old 10.0 and changed the method for fstab to UUID in yast. As it turned out, I got the same message again. I risked to simply proceed ;)

Installation

The first action I took was to choose the option to configure networking during install to be able to use external repositories.
I didn't bother with finding out how to configure WLAN at that point but simply plugged in a network cable to my router.
The setup found all the repository files I copied during the preparational steps and I enabled all of them.

The installation overview page showed a message that there were conflicts in the software section I need to resolve before I could perform the update.
I was expecting the worst, but only one package cause the conflict: some odd xen kernel package that I found safe to delete (never booted the xen kernel anyway).
I don't remember how long the update process took, I left the machine alone.

After the upgrade

Next time I checked the update, it was already finished and the laptop had rebooted in the meantime.

There were only three problems:

• 855resolution is no longer available
  But that was obviously no problem as X had the proper resolution anyway. So I just deleted the call to 855resolution that I had added to boot.local.
• X didn't start automatically in runlevel 5
  I soon found out that the kdmrc file was missing. The solution was to deinstall and then reinstall all kdm packages.
• Some of the external repos had not worked during update
  That means that some (multimedia) packages like mplayer or xmms were uninstalled. After checking that all repos were configured correctly I installed them again using zypper.

Conclusions

It was a lot easier and more reliable than I expected. Because there's not much personal data on that laptop (and on a separate home partition anyway), a full install wouldn't have been that bad if the upgrade hadn't worked. That's why I didn't bother to do a backup first.

I didn't really notice any changes. Except that I now use zypper instead of yum and get fresh updates again. Like Firefox 3.5.2 from the mozilla repo.