Hello Everyone,

I kept F10 until now because I wanted to keep the prop. ATI driver (the last one that would work with my laptop.) But support for F10 is about to come to a close, so I am going to have to upgrade. I don't believe I will have any issues upgrading since I have always done and have not had any issues. But my concern is that Fedora is the middle distro on my triple boot system (Ubuntu first, Fedora, and Slackware.) All three distros have always been booted by using Ubuntu's grub. But I am told that Fedora 11 (and probably Fedora 12) will require an additional small boot partition. I have a separate /home partition for each distro plus a swap, so I have 4 primaries and four extended partions.

I am happy to just stay with ext3 as my file system eliminating the need for a /boot partition, so my question is: is this possible? Will I be offered the choice during the upgrade, or will I be forced to use ext4 and create the /boot partition. If that is the case, I will not be able to upgrade because I do not want to alter the system or reformat and reinstall the setup (has taken about a year and a half to get it right).

Any thoughts or comments would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance..

Bob

Fedora doesn't need a boot partition - and the f/s type is irrelevant even if it did. Last weekend I did the F10 to F12 jump without issue. And converted from ext3 to ext4. And yes, I use the Ubuntu loader (Jaunty) too. Last count I was multi-booting 6 systems, so don't worry.
In my case I chainload Fedora so I don't have to worry about changing anything should the kernel (or release) level change. Just need to make sure to install to the root partition - it defaults to the MBR. For the partitioning, be very careful - it picked my Ubuntu partition, and tried to carve it up as an LVM install including another LV for swap. Hmmm ...
BTW, you can probably use the same swap for all your systems - I do.

Edit: this was a full re-install, not an upgrade.

Thanks, syg00, that's what I needed to know. But, I usually do an upgrade over the net for all the systems I have installed and usually do not have an issue. It worked fine for all three in the past, even Slackware. I will try it that way and make sure that fedora doesn't install grub then just add it to the Ubuntu grub menu.lst. I know I will have to go from 10 to 11 to 12. I don't use LVM so, hopefully, Fedora will recognize this and just upgrade the system. I asked my question becuase, as I understood it, Fedora now uses ext4 by default and the grub version Ubuntu was using would not boot an ext4 system, so an ext3 /boot partition was needed. |I didn't want to have to fool with adding another partition with eight already.

Thanks very much for your comments.

Bob

The problem you refer to is because of a change in inode size ext4 introduced - this was back-ported to ext3 as well. Legacy grub couldn't handle that for either ext3 or ext4. Ubuntu ship a patched grub to account for it (as does Pat nowadays I believe). So if you formatted that ext3 partition during the F10 install, you would have hit it then - ext4 won't cause any new issues there. If you simply upgrade you won't see it anyway - I don't know if anaconda would offer a conversion to ext4, but I'd be loathe to do it during an upgrade personally.