heres a quick and easy question I have, i am currently using fedora 8, and at the end ofthis month fedora 9 comes out, when fedora 9 is downloaded will it be part of theautomatic updates or will i have to go to the website and download it? also im assuming that all the data i have will not be lost in the transfer of Fedora 8 to Fedora 9 right?

It depends. You can do the upgrade (as far as I know) in three ways: either by using the package manager (yum?) to do a distribution upgrade, which means downloading and upgrading each and every package on the system to the new versions - takes time, is prone to big problems if anything interferes during the upgrade (hence you should first only download the packages, do a dry-run, and after they've been cached to disk run the actual upgrade) and is typically unclean (causes trouble afterwards that take some time to clean up - mainly configuration file changes and such, or because some parts of the new system don't fit in with the old, and if the upgrade doesn't go cleanly..well, it's your loss). The other two ways require you to download the installation media and write the discs (DVD, CD, your choice). Second way is booting from the media and selecting an "upgrade" option from the installer, if it's present - it has been in previous versions if I'm right. That does essentially what I described above, but you'll have the packages on the discs and since the system itself is not running during the upgrade, there may be less trouble. Third option is to overwrite your existing system, doing a clean installation which means formatting your root partition during the upgrade - this is the clean way, most trouble-free (as in "less after cleaning") and at the same time cleans up your root partition a bit if it's messy. Means you'll need to reinstall any software again you had installed that doesn't belong to the "out of the box" selection.

You should in any case take backups of your important data. Just because the upgrade should not destroy anything it doesn't mean that it couldn't. This is just an advice, you're free to do whatever you want, but if you happen to mess up, it's your own fault If you have your /home on it's separate partition, you can do a clean reinstallation of the system (just make sure you 'manually partition', select the old partitions like they were and make sure /home is not marked to be formatted) and not lose anything. If you have /home on the root partition (same partition as /), then doing a clean reinstallation of course deletes your data unless you've got backups.

I would recommend doing the clean reinstallation, including formatting of root partition, because it works. It doesn't create any curious trouble situations, no old configuration file problems, nothing like that. If that is out of the question - for example your /home is not on it's own partition and you don't want to start backing it up (but even then I would suggest to do that, and alter your partition configuration now that you have a chance) - then my second best recommendation is downloading and burning the setup disc(s) and doing the upgrade by booting off the setup disc and selecting the upgrade option. Only if you absolutely cannot download and write the discs, you should try the package manager based distribution upgrade; there are instructions on the web on how to do it (last time I tried it meant installing a package that updated package manager reposity information and then running dist-upgrade and hoping for the best - it worked for me, but the next time it didn't and the system was a little messy for some time before I got it cleaned up).

Note that there is no significant difference between download times no matter what you do. Maybe you could get faster trough it if you did not download all the installation cds (if they still make cds), and didn't install anything from the last discs. But probably you do need all the discs; anyway the amount of data (discs or packages) to download is about the same anyway, so you could just as well get the discs and do it right - in case it fails, you still have the setup media to fix the situation.

wow, thanks for the answer, kinda long, but im fairly sure i got most of it, so i havent beenrunning fedora 8 very long and dont have to many files, only enough importnt files where i could just put them on a 1g flash drive, so im guessing just to partion and get rid of fedora 8 and just overwrite it with this? so i would have to reinstall the drivers for my wirless card etc. so there isnt jus a way to download it w/o deleting any of my files? if there is a way which one of the ones you just said is it? im kinda new to linux and got just a little confused on wat you said :P so if i could just download it via yum without partioning any of my software or files that would be great, i highly appreciate your vivid reponse, thanks again

Nolan

For future upgrades and re-installs, make the /home directory on it's own partition. Then your personal files won't be touched as long as you don't format that partition.

EDIT: Oops, b0uncer covered that.

Is there any idea will Fedora ever support live-upgrade like debian, mandriva etc?

how exactly do you do that?

o wait nvm, i think i got it, thanks again i will be back with the results in about 1 month when i finaly get it installed, :P

It does. There's an rpm on the Fedora site (and disk) that auto updates your repos (or you can change them yourself too), and then run "yum upgrade". You may have a few kinks here and there (but so does debian sometimes too), but I've done it for FC6 to Fedora 7 to Fedora 8.

There's a new way to upgrade to Fedora 9. According to the FedoraProject.org website, the PreUpgrade feature "Allow users to easily download all the files needed to upgrade their distro, and then reboot into the installer without burning media." It appears to be bandwidth friendly and environmentally friendly.

The posting by nonfatlexec sounds like it is just running a net-installer which will then offer the option to upgrade, as if using an installation CD. That is not the same thing as upgrading using the package manager. The posting by Armanox is the equivalent of debian's apt-get dist-upgrade, apt-get update.