Upgrading Red Hat
Posted Mar 27, 2003 10:10 UTC (Thu) by
james (subscriber, #1325)
In reply to:
Red Hat Linux 9 review (of sorts) by minichaz
Parent article:
Red Hat Linux 9 announced
Has anyone used the "upgrade" option on the Red Hat installation? I've never risked it but I would be interested to know if its any good.
Yes, I'll regularly upgrade Red Hat releases. I've only ever come across three problems, two of which one might expect:
- One older computer, with 32 MB RAM and about 80 MB swap (that runs in text mode only, usually headless), didn't have quite enough virtual memory to upgrade to Red Hat 8. The upgrade hung while upgrading glibc, which left the computer "between OSes". Since I had decent backups, I reinstalled from scratch, having increased swap space.
I was surprised that the install didn't warn me about this, but it failed to do a new install as well without extra swap.
- Obviously, if you change too much in your installation (running Bastille or changing mail servers, for instance), then upgrade, you end up with something which isn't quite one version, not quite the next, not quite hardened, etc. The upgrade does a very good job, but it's practically impossible for it to Do The Right Thing in every circumstance.
- I have my own set of fortune files. On every upgrade, Red Hat insists on replacing them with the default standard set, which have hardly changed in about ten years. Major problem there, methinks...
Hope this helps,
James.
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