Re: RedHat Fedora Core Upgrade

[Steven Pritchard <steve@silug.org>]

On Tue, Jan 16, 2007 at 07:31:42AM -0600, Robert G. (Doc) Savage wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-01-15 at 23:45 -0600, R Hill wrote:
> >   Is there any easy way to upgrade from Fedora Core 1 to Fedora Core 5 ? 
> > It seems that the images for 5 & 6 are only found on the fedora core
> > website ...?
[...]
> Longer answer: Major version upgrades are designed to be incremental.
> Skipping more than one major version is asking for trouble. I'm sure
> others will tell you to use this or that method and you'll be fine. But
> each new Fedora release adds or changes something big. Stuff gets
> dropped. Other stuff gets added. Examples: Firefox has replaced Mozilla,
> yum has replaced up2date. If you try to upgrade from release 1 to
> release 5 you can't help but skip over important evolutionary
> components.
> 
> Your best bet will be to archive everything you want to keep (e.g., home
> directory, images, etc.) to tape, CD, or other hard drives, then do a
> from scratch installation of FC5/6.

I couldn't disagree more.  This is the reason we have package
management:  to handle package upgrades.  A new release is just a
bunch of package upgrades with some magic to handle the occasional
major change (like the modular xorg move away from /usr/X11R6).
Luckily, the magic has been gradually moving out of the installer and
into the various packages, so future versions should be less dependent
on the installer (meaning in-place upgrades with yum and friends will
work that much better).

Just about any version upgrade requires a little bit of manual cleanup
afterwards.  Jumping 5 releases just means a chance of 5 times the
manual cleanup.  It really shouldn't be that painful.

I recently upgraded our phone system from FC2 to FC6.  Granted it was
a server, so it was quite a bit easier than a desktop, but it was a
completely smooth upgrade.

> Finally, if you're running hardware or software written specifically for
> FC1 and hasn't been upgraded, I suggest leaving your FC1 system alone,
> buy a new one, and start over.

If the software is packaged as rpms, the dependencies should be easy
enough to fix after the upgrade (if it is even necessary).

Hardware is another issue.  FC1 was based on a 2.4 kernel.  Everything
since then is 2.6-based.  It's entirely possible (though unlikely)
that hardware drivers were lost.

On another note, it makes no sense to go to FC5 now.  FC6 has been out
for a couple of months now.  If you are going to upgrade, go to the
latest version.

Steve (Fedora developer - http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/StevenPritchard)
-- 
steve@silug.org           | Southern Illinois Linux Users Group
(618)398-3000             | See web site for meeting details.
Steven Pritchard          | http://www.silug.org/

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