After I killed my SuSE 10.1 installation on my good old IBM Thinkpad yesterday (I tried to upgrade to the latest Gnome release without success), I installed openSUSE 10.2 today.
The installation worked like a charme and the system installed without any problems.
Before installing the new system I did a backup of my data partition (I had ReiserFS and wanted to try ext3, so I had decided to do a clean install). This is an old Thinkpad A30 and its old USB-1.1 port is very, very, veeeery slow. I remembered my last backup, which was only about 20GB and ran the whole night to finish. That’s simply disappointing.
So I decided to do a network based backup with netcat, easy and simple. At home I have an Windows XP PC and I downloaded a windows compatible netcat. This tools helped me to copy the files from my Linux computer to the Windows box, where they manifested itself as a gzipped tarball. This was much faster!
After the installation I wanted to copy the files back to the fresh Linux box, but had trouble with Windows. Feeding the netcat with a simple cat (I tried cat from Unxutils) I thought would suffice. I was wrong! Cat died after some seconds, my backup tarball was maybe to big (only 15GB).
I decided to give the latest BackTrack a try. You know what? That worked without batting an eyelid. Now I only need to do some cleanup and install some useful tools.
Update: After some years with Gnome desktop I spontanously decided to go with KDE. The first impression is great! I do not really like the default theme… but otherwise KDE rules with this new start menu.
