Everytime, or almost everytime I run Software Update, the software politely reminds me that F15, Laughlin, is now available. But I have hesitated to take its offer to install it, since that last time I tried this, the software update program failed to do a sanity check to see if there was enough room on my Linux partition before wasting my time with a long download and install procedure: I can't remember how I figured out what hoops to jump through to finally get the install/upgrade (from F13 to F14) to work, and I don't want to suffer through it again.

Nor does the Fedora Project documentation really help me out here: I still cannot find documentation, for each of the install/upgrade methods mentioned there (e.g. PreUpgrade, Anaconda installer, yum), what the disk space requirements are. I have looked in the Wiki, the release notes, and the official manual.

So my question is: given that I have only 5.0G free on my Linux partition, which one of these methods should I use to upgrade from F14 to F15 without losing any of my files or installed programs? Or do I really need to free up more disk space before I try any of them?

Oh, for reference, just in case this is also needed: sfdisk -l shows:

Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 0+ 10999 11000- 88357468+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2 * 11000 11025- 26- 204800 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 11025+ 14568 3544- 28463192+ 8e Linux LVM
/dev/sda4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty

sda2 is boot, it has 126M free.

I recommend afresh installation of F15, if possible. Between the changeover from upstart to systemd, and Gnome2 to Gnome3, there are many opportunities for things to go awry. When I upgrade to a new release of Fedora (rather than do a reinstall), I edit the files in /etc/yum.repos.d to point to the new release then upgrade piecemeal via yumex. Seems to work better for me than one massive upgrade. As always, YMMV.

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Given that choice, I would rather stick with F14. For though as you say, "there are many opportunities for things to go awry", the same is true if I have to re-install all my software and copy over all my miscellaneous data files.

Sure, I know software installations are all supposed to live in well-defined directories (e.g. /usr/bin) and store their configurations in well-defined subdirectories of '/etc' (or, like vim in filenames beginning w/ '.' in user's homedir), but I am not confident that they are all that well-behaved.

That is why so far, I have done upgrades rather than fresh installs since F11. And the only problems I have had so far with that approach were, as I implied above, due to undocumented or poorly documented limits on size requirements for disks or file systems for the given upgrade utility.

Finally, as to your idea of using 'yumex'. How does this differ from "one massive upgrade"? You still left out describing how you tell yum (or yumex) which packages to get. Did you mean to say that I should copy the config files, including the repolists, from the old installation of F14, edit to point them to F15, and then run the yumex equivalent of "yum reinstall"? That should do a massive reinstall of all the software I had before, but from the repositories for the up-to-date version of Fedora (F15). But then all the configuration files for the programs themselves are still reset to installation defaults.

With yumex (a gui front-end for yum), I just select a few ((10-20) files at a time to upgrade. If, due to dependencies, it looks like a very large number of upgrades are going to be performed at once, I revise my selection to limit the number of packages upgraded at once. Hopefully, this reduces the likelihood of upgrade failure.

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