openSuSE 11.4 update notes

As Kubuntu copes better with Medusa's hardware, SuSE isn't my productivity distro right now, so I decided to risk an online upgrade. I mainly followed the SBD instructions on http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:System_upgrade.

I uninstalled OpenOffice in YaST as a precaution (11.4 comes with LibreOffice), disabled all repos (OOO and Mozilla build services, KDE Factory and the basic ones) except Packman, which I replaced by its 11.4 counterpart.
Online update protocol:

sudo zypper refresh

sudo zypper update

sudo zypper modifyrepo --all --disable

After that, I changed packman in YaST to 11.4 and re-enabled it.

sudo zypper addrepo --name "openSUSE-11.4 OSS" http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.4/repo/oss/ repo-11.4-oss

zypper addrepo --name "openSUSE-11.4 Non-OSS" http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.4/repo/non-oss/ repo-11.4-non-oss

zypper addrepo --name "openSUSE-11.4 Updates" http://download.opensuse.org/update/11.4/ repo-11.4-update

zypper ref

zypper dup --download "in-advance"

Up to that point, everything went well, so I dared to reboot, which resulted in a powered-off screen shortly after the Grub menu. A failsafe boot got me as far as "blogd: cannot read from fd 0: input/output error". I went home, grabbed a DVD, burned the 11.4 ISO and did an upgrade of the upgrade from there, which, thankfully, worked. Still, this is a glorious first: on previous releases, I always ended up with a complete root disk wipe and a new install.
First impressions: the graphics/overlay problems which annoyed me on 11.3 seem to have been resolved, KDE 4.6 looks pretty slick (might have been hardware specific, Medusa has an Optimus chip and I didn't have the problem with Tisiphone's standard Nvidia). The bureaucracy-grey-green stripes are somewhat depressing, though - being a girl, I liked the bubbles in 11.3. Firefox 4 beta seems to have a problem with Flash video, Chrome hasn't. LibreOffice integration looks good. And being a person continually tempted by bleeding-edge releases and too often let down by Factory in the process, I m rather excited about Tumbleweed…

Random gem from openSuSE'S  Licence:
"As required by US law, you represent and warrant that you: ... (d) will not use or transfer openSUSE 11.4 for use in any sensitive nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons or missile technology end-uses unless authorized by the US Government by regulation or specific license;" I double-checked my government issued Mad Scientist SuSE Usage Licence and happily typed 'yes'.