Upgrading from Fedora 7 to Fedora 12
 

Hi there --

I am planning on doing an upgrade on one of our systems from Fedora Core 7 to the Fedora Core 12 distribution. I have read Bruce Byfield's article "Upgrading to the newest Fedora release", and the approach that I am planning on taking is the upgrading via the DVD medium.

Aside from the gotchas that he outlines in his piece, is/are there any other issues that I should be aware of before beginning the process?

Thanks.

Please don't even bother trying this... each upgrade between fedora versions has it's risks, I'd give you a 4% chance of success between these two versions. And if you upgrade, you'll not end up with FC12, you'll end up with a horribley messy mish mash of a distribution that just happens to mostly contain FC12 rpms. Do yourself a proper favour and save important data and configs, and reinstall. and then keep it up to date properly.

Glennzo posted a thread in http://forums.fedoraforum.org about upgrading which surfaced in a recent thread. If it's a production system I'd strongly suggest copying the setup to a test slash staging server to see if cleanly installing and modifying F12 versus upgrading to 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 is more efficient slash less error-prone.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll try doing the upgrade on a test server to see if it works. I realize I am playing with the odds, but at least I will know one way or the other.

If the upgrade does not work, I'll proceed with a scratch install.

Thanks again.

Recently I updated my Fedora 8 (x86_64) to Fedora 12.
Direct update wasn't possible, but Fedora 8 -> fedora 10 (or 11 ?) -> Fedora 12 worked quite well.

Of course update is always a risk, so backup you config files

If possible, back up user data and do a new install rather than an upgrade. I can think of several gotchas between F7 and F12 that can ruin your day:

• hd to sd renaming of hard disks
• kernel mode Xorg drivers
• preference to use of Logical Volume Manager
• sticking with ext3 versus ext4

IIRC Fedora 5 already had sd? instead of hd?

seeing as fedora changed the /boot format to 256 ( was 128) in the newer versions and that fedora now uses ext4 ( and not ext3- fedora 7)

do a FULL clean install after blanking the disk
remove ALL partitions and leave it unformatted

let the fedora 12 install dvd do the formatting
do NOT even bother to save any of the software settings in the /home folders
the old ones from f7 will not work in fedora 12
save your music,videos,photos,and doc's
but that is it .