I just upgraded my openSuSE 11.0 distro, first to the last release candidate for 11.1 last week, and then to the final released version yesterday.

There were some things I wanted to explore that led me to upgrade so late in the release cycle just prior to the final .1 version step, but among them was to see how this Novell distro handled the process.

Upping from 11.0 to 11.1.rc was done via an .iso download burned to DVD. Booting to this live disc and clicking the install icon on the desktop and then choosing upgrade resulted in all settings, personal files, and menu categories remaining intact from the existing installation.

Perfect! What could be simpler?

Then, when 11.1 final was released I fired up YaST, the SuSE Swiss-Army knife, and selected upgrade all available packages. When the smoke cleared I had an up-to-the-minute openSuSE 11.1 installation.

The point I'm making here is that both the optical disc install/upgrade and the package manager upgrade process worked flawlessly, resulting in a system that was brand new but that retained the programs I had installed and all my personal settings.

There was one package that threw an exception in the latter upgrade process - Amarok, the KDE audio player. This decision point appeared both in the graphical YaST software installation application and at the command prompt when I executed "sudo yast dup" for (d)istribution (up)grade.

The problem was an unmet dependency, and it was probably caused by my not having one of the required repositories active in the package manager.

Dealing with this notice as well as understanding its cause, significance, and resolution would have posed a challenge to new and non-technical users, but the solution is made simpler by both the GUI and the CLI operation presenting the three acceptable options, requiring only that the user choose.

My choice was to not upgrade that one non-critical application, and was an option that anyone performing a distribution upgrade in the first place could have been expected to reason through. The other options were to not install the changed dependency and to ignore dependencies for that application.

Again, the point I'm making here is that this highly sophisticated operation - upgrading an entire operating system and the hundreds of applications it installs required NO specialized knowledge when done via DVD using the distro's installer, and only minimal intervention upgrading live over the Internet using the distro's package manager.

It would be interesting to hear of others' experiences performing installs/upgrades of proprietary operating systems. It is clearly the case that MOST users NEVER install an OS at all. That virtually always comes with the computer.

Any criticism of the challenge, as minor as I hope I just illustrated in these spare details, of doing such an upgrade with GNU/Linux needs to begin with an acknowledgment of how difficult even an initial installation, let alone an upgrade resulting in all user installations and configurations remaining intact, would be with, let's say, one of Microsoft's OSes.

Frank