Man, openSUSE updates kick my ass

My work machine was on openSUSE Leap 15.4, and I saw (I think it was in Reddit) that they were going to delete the 15.3 sources because they are already working on 15.6 and people should have moved to 15.5. I hadn’t moved to 15.5 yet, but I thought I ought to.

I downloaded the ISO and used SUSE Image Writer to put it on a USB stick. From it, I booted and chose “upgrade”. It turns out that I had two Leap installations on my hard drive: 15.3 on /dev/sda2 and 15.4 on /dev/sda4

Also, the upgrade wizard complained that the USB booted to UEFI, but the boot config on the hard drive is Legacy BIOS.

I found an article that said I could tell the installer to configure the machine to use grub for booting instead of grub-efi, so I selected that.

Yes, of course, on boot I got a single blinking cursor in the upper corner of the first monitor. This happens far too many times when I upgrade openSUSE.

So now, I’m in the middle of my second attempt at upgrading, but this time choosing install instead of upgrade. I did choose to delete every Linux partition on /dev/sda, so at least I won’t have two versions of it sitting on the hard disk.

I’m going to have to go back and fix /home – I learned a long time ago to put my home directory on a second hard drive. This lets me move to a whole PC if I need to. But it also protects my home directory from getting messed with during an upgrade. The upgrade wizard, intentionally, keeps its work to just the one disk with the operating system on it.

I’ll also have to go back and add those pieces I used to have: KVM and Perl.

This is such a pain in the ass.

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