I'm not quite sure of what i am saying, so I will antecipatedly apologize for any insane thing.
It's been a very long since my last experience with Conectiva Linux, that was armed with Synaptic
(
www.howtoforge.com/apt_for_rpm)
In some distant plays with Redhat, I remember to have installed apt, also.
There is, undoubtly apt4rpm. I heard about "Yum", but I don't know what is it.
If you have apt in your Suse, an rpm based distro, it must know how to talk to your rpm database.
The challenge now is to find the correct configuration to get the needed packages from the right place.
Here I will be of no much help, since my lazyness makes me to live with my Mandriva / urpmi (argh) and I am not used to apt.
But even by a manual upgrade, you can still try downloading the base packages (as I said before) and listen carefully to the complains. If you're a bit lucky, it will work with no much effort.
The dependancies are the hell. God bless the man who dealed apt-like behaviour (and that the devil take the one that made rpm so loose)!