[SATLUG] Upgrade Fedora core 3 to core 6

[Bob Tracy]

Luis Garza wrote:
> I am spending the night downloading FC6 and backing up some of my directories 
> to CD.  I am feeling very hopefull since I went to church today.
> 
> So I am asking for any lessons learned while upgrading.

Best recommendation I can give is to read the release notes and pay
particular attention to the *strong* recommendation to do a "from scratch"
install vs. upgrading.  I'm pretty hard-headed and tend to believe that if
a distro vendor offers an upgrade option, it should work :-).  For the
most part, it does.  When the smoke clears, you'll have some semi-serious
cleanup to do...

(1) Your windowing environment of choice will pretty much be trashed.
    Fix is to delete all the dot files and directories under your home
    directory that have anything to do with GNOME and KDE -- let the
    window manager recreate them.  Desktop customizations will, of
    course, be lost: you'll need to recreate them.

(2) Many packages that were available in FC3 have no replacements that
    can be automatically determined by the FC6 upgrade process, i.e.,
    they are obsolete or have otherwise fallen out of favor.  After
    the upgrade, run "rpm -q -a --last" and save the output somewhere
    for reference: this generates a time-ordered list of RPMs on your
    system where the oldest RPMs will be at the end of the list.
    Anything with a date older than 2006 should probably be removed.
    If you need the functionality provided by a package that's a
    candidate for removal, try to find a modern replacement.  One you'll
    probably run into quickly is the RPM package that provides alternative
    desktop themes: if you had the FC3 version loaded, it didn't get
    upgraded and the old one won't work due to changes in where GNOME
    expects to find things.

Bottom line: if you're adventurous AND feel comfortable doing things
from the command line, do the upgrade -- you won't lose any critical
data, and you'll have quite the learning experience.  On the other hand,
if you don't crave that kind of excitement in your life, save those
configuration items and other critical data you can't live without,
then do a "from scratch" install.  If you elect the "from scratch"
approach and have the luxury of doing so, put it on a different machine
and then you won't have to worry about losing *anything*.

-- 
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Bob Tracy                   WTO + WIPO = DMCA? http://www.anti-dmca.org
rct at frus.com
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