Hello,
I have been using FC3 for about a year now as my primary OS. I am not a power user at all. The reviews for fedora 5 seem promising and I would like to upgrade to it. However, I do not want to lose my data in the upgrade process. I've backed all it up to DVDs but it would be nice to make a clean transfer to FC5 and have all my icons and panels in the same place etc.
I have FC5 on a DVD disk. On bootup my options for install include removing existing linux partitions, remove all partitions, or install over free space. Which should I pick? Is there anyway to install FC5 over FC3 or does each OS need to have its own place on the hard drive?

Thanks,
~Mark

It is possible to upgrade FC3 to FC5 using yum/yumex. I am a newbie too and am not sure of the details - I did it a long time ago. But if you search around you will definitely find a method because it can be done without great skill.

Try this site for info:
http://www.brandonhutchinson.com/Upg..._with_yum.html

And there are many others

You can change your apt sources to the FC5 tree, which I forgot exactly what the path is, but it is the same on all Fedora mirrors. You just change that path in apt-source, and do:

apt-get --update-distro

and then:

apt-get --dist-upgrade

Then you have to fix all the problems, which shouldn't be too bad.

Read the man page for apt-source and apt-get before you do it, but that will upgrade, leaving your /home directory intact. The thing is you might not be able to go from FC3 directly to FC5, you might have to do FC4 in between. FC5 is a machine hog, too. Unless you have a lot of machine, don't even bother with it. I have it on a Pentium 4 3.0 GHz machine with 512 MB of ram, but FC5 seems to want more ram. Before I had Debian Sarge and it worked a lot better. But, this is my putz machine. I install all different distros on it just to check them out. I use a separate /home partition so I can do a full install and just not format /home.