16 Upgrading the System and
System Changes
You can upgrade an existing system without completely reinstalling it. There are two
types of renewing the system or parts of it: updating individual software packages
and upgrading the entire system. Updating individual packages is covered in Chap-
ter 5, Installing or Removing Software (page 79) and Chapter 6, YaST Online Up-
date (page 99). Two ways to upgrade the system are discussed in the following
sections— see Section 16.1.3, “Upgrading with YaST” (page 184) and Section 16.1.4,
“Distribution Upgrade with zypper” (page 185).
16.1 Upgrading the System
Software tends to “grow” from version to version. Therefore, take a look at the
available partition space with df before updating. If you suspect you are running
short of disk space, secure your data before you update and repartition your system.
There is no general rule regarding how much space each partition should have. Space
requirements depend on your particular partitioning prole, the software selected,
and the version numbers of the system.
16.1.1 Preparations
Before upgrading, copy the old conguration les to a separate medium (such as
removable hard disk or USB ash drive) to secure the data. This primarily applies to
les stored in /etc as well as some of the directories and les in /var. You may also
want to write the user data in /home (the HOME directories) to a backup medium. Back
up this data as root. Only root has read permission for all local les.
Before starting your update, make note of the root partition. The command df / lists
the device name of the root partition. In Example 16.1, “List with df -h” (page 183),
the root partition to write down is /dev/sda3 (mounted as /).
Example 16.1: List with df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3 74G 22G 53G 29% /
udev 252M 124K 252M 1% /dev
/dev/sda5 116G 5.8G 111G 5% /home
/dev/sda1 39G 1.6G 37G 4% /windows/C
/dev/sda2 4.6G 2.6G 2.1G 57% /windows/D
Upgrading the System and System Changes 183
