One of the features I always envied the Ubuntu people for is the ability to do a distro upgrade without tearing down my whole system and doing the CD-Dance. While that may still be needed from time to time to ensure a nice and compact system, it is just incredibly time consuming. With the latest version of ZYpp openSuSE now has the ability to just do that. It’s not yet as comfortable and staightforward as in Ubuntu, but it definitely improved from what I tried manually when upgrading from 11.0 to 11.1. First of all we need to update to the latest patch level from the update repository:

zypper addrepo --check --name 'openSUSE-11.1-Update' http://download.opensuse.org/update/11.1/ repo-update
zypper refresh
zypper update

If you already have the Update repository in your list then the first call will fail, but the others should work just fine. Now that we have an up to date system we’ll make sure zypper knows where to get the new software from:

zypper renamerepo repo-oss 111-repo-oss
zypper renamerepo repo-update 111-repo-update
zypper renamerepo repo-non-oss 111-repo-non-oss

zypper modifyrepo --all --disable

zypper addrepo --name "openSUSE-11.2 OSS" http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.2/repo/oss/ repo-oss
zypper addrepo --name "openSUSE-11.2 Non-OSS" http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.2/repo/non-oss/ repo-non-oss
zypper addrepo --name "openSUSE-11.2 Updates" http://download.opensuse.org/update/11.2/ repo-update

The first three lines take care of avoiding naming conflicts, then we disable all the repositories, since we don’t want software from old, incompatible repositories anymore, and then we add the new installation repositories. While the official guide only puts this advice in the workaround section, I would strongly suggest to do a

mv /etc/zypp/repos.d /etc/zypp/repos.d-backup

instead of the first 4 steps, to start with completely new repository list and metadata. Now install the newest version of zypper:

zypper refresh --force
zypper in zypper

Now all that’s left to do is download the upgrades and once everything is there, do the distro-upgrade:

zypper dup -d
YAST_IS_RUNNING=instsys zypper dup
SuSEconfig

After the first command go through the list of packages that will be removed and if there is something important, please reenable the custom repositories that contain the software needed. In my case I had to add the ATI repo for my graphics controller. Afterwards just refresh again and redo the dup steps. If all went smoothely, just reboot your system and enjoy openSuSE 11.2 in all its shiny glory