A mere five months after the release of SuSE 10.3 I finally got round to upgrading my aging laptop. Of course, I was still on 10.1, so I'd already waited ten months before that

I downloaded the main ISO and the extras one, and booted off the CD. Encountered a slight problem getting it to boot initially, but when I clicked for 'view details' in the boot process I saw a helpful message about adding brokenmodules to the boot options. I also had to disable acpi, so I ended up with these options:

acpi=off brokenmodules=pata_ali

The next issue was I had a load of extra repositories enabled on 10.1, and it turned out the Guru repo is now part of Packman so you have to disable it before starting the upgrade, otherwise the upgrade hangs.

After that it was more time consuming than complicated, I had a load of package conflicts to resolve, and for a time it seemed like I was going round in circles with that. Then I just had to wait overnight while it did the actual upgrade, and now I have it all installed and working.

The default KDE theme is a bit different, lots of faux transparency, and there's a new, more compact, application menu which is quite nice, but otherwise not massively different from the end user point of view. With some updated underlying packages I'm hoping I'll now have a better chance of installing more recent software.