I want to upgrade Redhat 9 to Fedora Core 2. I have a couple questions I will need answered first.

1. Is it an upgrade, or a complete new install? ie. Will all of my files, applications, and configuration still be there after an upgrade, or will they be lost? Do I have to go through a lot of reconfiguration?

2. Does upgrading require restarting the computer? I assume that it does, but I was just wondering because I don't want to interrupt my web/mail servers. If it's necessary, I can just do it at night I guess.


Thanks in advance.

Chris

Hi.

1) Don't upgrade, just do a fresh install - I've yet to see an upgrade that worked properly. If you created seperate partitions for /home, /var, and /etc (the last one's very unlikely) when you installed RH9, then you won't lose any files or configuration as long as you don't format those partitions. The configuration files in /etc may, or may not work with the new version of Fedora, as there have been major changes since RH9.
If you didn't create seperate partitions, you'll have to back up and restore once the system's running.

2) Yes, you'll require a restart. I would leave aside several hours to get your system reconfigured exactly how you want it too. These thing invariably take 4 times longer that you expect.

Dave

P.S. I could be wrong about the upgrade not working, but in my experience (almost every version of RedHat since 7.0) something always ends up corrupted. Either way, back up before you do anything. If you're running servers which are critical to what you're doing, you may want to think hard about whether an upgrade is really needed, too.

I agree with pointyman. I upgraded my RH9 to FC2 and it worked.... somehow. There were some a few problems like XKB error, USB mouse undetected, my network screwed up. So I did a fresh install of FC2 and everything worked like a charm.

Just my two cents.

Upgrading is initially easier, but it seems like you spend an awful lot of time finding and fixing the bugs in the system after an upgrade. You do have to recustomize a fresh install of FC2, but when you’re done, you’re done!

If your drive is large enough, shrink down your existing RHL9 partition (assuming you have separate partitions for your user files (e.g., home, etc.)), do a fresh FC2 install in a new partition, mount the RHL9 partition under FC2 and copy over anything you need (iptables, smb.conf, etc.). If you have the disk space and can shrink RHL9 down, there is no reason to delete the RHL9 from the system.

Okay... so I have three partitions: boot, swap, and then one with everything else. I have about 100 GB free at the moment. Under my current partitioning arrangement is it possible to shrink the RH9 partition? That sounds ideal to me, rather than backing everything up to removable media and restoring. Also, someone mentioned I should consider whether it is worthwhile to get FC2 rather than RH9. What are your opinions on this? My server is relatively low volume and would not be a problem to have off for a few hours.

Thanks

redhatman: Sounds like the shrink would work for you.

For me, it went something like this. The RHL9 partition contained everything (i.e., no separate /boot). It was resized down to about 6GB using PartitionMagic and then moved to the end of the extended partition (all of the linux partitions are logical partitions on the system). Then two logical partitions (/FEDORA and /HOME) were created behind the existing swap partition, which is the first logical partition on the drive. After the FC2 installation, I mounted the RHL9 partition, copied out things like iptables and smb.conf and pasted them into the FC2 partition.

I also wanted RHL9 to be bootable, so I opened the RHL9 grub.conf, copied out the entry for the most recent kernel, pasted it into the FC2 grub.conf and modified the FC2 grub.conf drive definitions for the RHL9 partition to match the new location. Then I check/modified the RHL9 fstab to make sure that the correct partitions were being pointed to, since the RHL9 partition was moved. Now, both FC2 and RHL9 boot without problems.

To make things a little cleaner before the shrink, you might want to move /boot back into the main RHL9 partition. The separate /boot thing is really an overkill anyway, unless you have a really old system.

Hmm well I had no problem during and after upgrading from RH9 to FC2. I am typing this using the same updated FC2 without any hitch and problems. May be I dont have that much hardware or services running on my PC. In short, the transition was smooth and flawless.