It looks like Red Hat will be cutting off my access to updates before too much longer, so time to start thinking about switching to another distribution. I know /local should be safe (though I might have to recompile everything) and /etc will probably be lost. Beyond that, how painful is it to switch distributions?

I also have a CD of applications in .rpm packages. Does a new distribution make this CD a coaster?

You mean that they're no longer providing updates to 7.2 don't you? (Or did you do something to really tick 'em off? :-) )

You can always upgrade, you know.

As for keeping things safe during any migration -- even if it's just an upgrade to your current distribution -- I strongly suggest placing your /home tree on it's own filesystem. The same for /usr/local. Then when you're upgrading -- or even doing a fresh install -- just don't tell the installer to touch the partitions that those filesystems live in. With Red Hat, I just use the custom installation so that I don't have to worry about the process assuming something stupid (like the whole disk is fair game for the new version... and bye bye data). After the upgrade/migration, you just have to examine what the upgrade/installation placed in /home and/or /usr/local, see if it's really needed or not, clean it out and mount your saved filesystems on the empty directories. (Or you could: ``mv /home /home.installed ; mkdir /home ; mount home-partition /home''. Same thing for /usr/local.)

If you've placed everything in one gigantic filesystem, you'll have to do some backups unless you have unused partitions that you can allocate to new filesystems. Then you'd need to move everything under /home, for example, to one of your new filesystems. (Ditto with /usr/local.)

Hope this helps,

Rick

Or you could keep your existing distro installed and perform updates by other means instead of using Redhat's update method. You know all those packages you update most of the time you can usually find elsewhere ?

Right. You should be able to get all you need by visiting the web site for the software you need most and get a more recent version than even a new release of Red Hat normally has.

I was using RH7.2 when I signed up for this site. I upgraded to RH8 a week or so after 8 was available due to 8 being required for my new printer to be supported. I tried to fix the thing saying I'm using 7.2 in the user profile place but it refuses to update my record. It isn't really worth pursuing.

Anyway, I got a notice from Red Hat that they're basically ending free updates. Once your contract period (however long that is) is up, no more free updates without completing a survey which will "buy" you 2 more months.

I have a big partition called /hotaru. And I use symbolic links to make /home -> /hotaru/home and /usr/local -> /hotaru/local. The other partitions are /usr, /var, and /boot.

I haven't picked another distribution just yet, something made harder to do with hardware compatibility being an issue. I'd also prefer something that can use .rpm packages so I don't lose some applications. When given a choice, I've downloaded source .tar.gz files instead of .rpm for this reason. But sometimes I have no choice.

Sounds pretty much the same thing as I was suggesting but without the fstab tweaking.
Heck, you can even grab kernel updates as tar archives and still use them with RedHat. I've done that and seen no ill effects. You just don't get the dependency checking that rpm does for you. Besides, it sure looks like rpm has gotten fragile in V8. And the GUI interface has become decidedly non-intuitive (to me at least).

Anyway, good luck,

Rick