Fedora upgrade procedure [LWN.net]

Fedora upgrade procedure

Posted Nov 10, 2006 1:53 UTC (Fri) by kheine7 (guest, #41582)
In reply to: by rsidd
Parent article: Fedora Core 6 review (Software In Review)

> To this day, Fedora apparently recommends backup, reformat and reinstall as the upgrade procedure.

Gee I must be luck. I have taken my laptop through Fedora Core 1 -> Fedora Core 6 over time with no problem with upgrades. And this is not the only machine I have done with with. So to say the only way to upgrade Fedora is through a re-install is rubbish and I have my laptop to prove it.

> Debian solved the package management and upgrade problem years ago.

To bash Fedora Core/Extras about other 3rd party repos not working is like saying to the Ford that my car does not work anymore since I took it to the local mechanic. I bet not all Debian/Ubuntu repos work 100% with the main system all the time.

> There is no excuse for a modern distro not having a sane updating and upgrading procedure.

You are 100% right and I couldn't agree with you more BUT please check what you right is 100% right before you start saying things that dont agree.

PS. Please check the post at slashdot about Ubuntu 6.4 -> Ubuntu 6.10 upgrade not working. (http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/06/10/28/239258.shtml)

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Fedora upgrade procedure

Posted Nov 10, 2006 20:12 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link]

"""
> To this day, Fedora apparently recommends backup, reformat and reinstall as the upgrade procedure.

Must be. And that's a good thing, because otherwise I'd have to call you on a bald-faced lie. ;-)

Few upgrade through 5 releases of any OS without a problem. Least of all Fedora users, where easy upgrades are not a particularly important goal. (At least Fedora Unity is doing some respins, in stark contrast to the traditional Fedora policy of "This horrendous installation problem will be fixed in FCx+1, but we don't do respins.)

And this is most especially true on a laptop, where you can't just run out and buy a card with a supported chipset and then simply fib a little about how things "just worked".)

You are, indeed, one lucky guy... because I know you wouldn't lie.

Fedora upgrade procedure

Posted Nov 16, 2006 8:21 UTC (Thu) by Pc5Y9sbv (guest, #41328) [Link]

> Must be. And that's a good thing, because otherwise I'd have to call you on a bald-faced lie. ;-)
>

I don't know about using the install media in "perform an upgrade" mode, but I upgraded a laptop from FC3 -> FC4 -> FC5 simply by using rpm to install the new fedora-release package (switches versioning metadata for yum) and then running yum to pull in and upgrade all of the packages. I'd do an upgrade to FC6 right now as a test, but that old machine developed bad blocks and I reinstalled FC5 on a new harddrive since this episode...

I followed one of the how-tos I found in a quick websearch for "fedora remote upgrade yum", which documented a couple of gotchas and pitfalls. It worked very nicely, such that I was able to do it remotely from another continent with only two hiccups:

1) running out of disk during FC3->FC4 yum upgrade! had to delete some packages to make space, delete a few stragglers of the old FC3 packages, re-run yum upgrade, and get back to good working order

2) had to arrange for someone to plug it into ethernet since I wasn't feeling up to the task of trying to build new atheros drivers (out of kernel) in lock-step with each reboot into a newer kernel.

Truth be told, I suspect this method may be more reliable than the install media method... my experience with Fedora is that the brand-spanking-new release is always a bit fragile. This method, when applied carefully, allows you to upgrade directly to the later maintenance updates and avoid running the earliest versions of packages in the new release.

BTW, if you shopped carefully and got a Thinkpad that had good hardware support in the kernel, you wouldn't find it surprising to have newer versions of Fedora continue to work well with the same machine. ;-)