Fedora 5 to 10 Upgrade with Evolution

jclements · 04-19-2009, 12:19 PM

Hi, not exactly a newbie, but newbie question. I have a really stable PC with Fedora Core 5 on it with Evolution mail and lots of saved email. Obviously I'm behind the curve on Fedora upgrades and would like to upgrade to Fedora 10. Any suggstions on how to do this and transfer/not lose email stored in Evolution? Have /boot partition of ~100 MB and / partition of about 170 GB. Have 8 GB USB flash drive.

John Clements
www.cclug.org

PTrenholme · 04-19-2009, 02:35 PM

Will your /home partition fit into the 8Gb drive? df /home should give you a clue, but, if it's too large, consider tar with a compression option. (It might make a good backup, too.)

Anyhow, save the /home partition, install the new system, and restore the parts of /home that seem appropriate. (I don't use Evolution, so I can't be specific.)

You might also want to think about distributions that are more stable than Fedora with it's approximately "every six months" update schedule (F11 is due out 26 May) and policy that terminates support for distributions more than one release old. For example, Ubuntu offers "Long term Support" versions that they intend to support for at least two years after release. (Other distributions may offer similar support options, but I've not looked for LTS since I don't mind updating frequently. Being retired, I've got lots of free time and enjoy playing with my computers, and there's no real-world down-side to breaking one or two of my systems.)

repo · 04-19-2009, 02:37 PM

evolution has a backup option.
file=>backup settings.

valholla · 04-21-2009, 05:15 PM

A more stable version is a relative term. I went from Fedora 7 -> 9 and now 10. I have had very little problems with anything on my HPdv9000 laptop. opensuse was just as stable, but I prefer the rpm/yum interface for package management over the zypper.

on the contrary I have had nothing but problems running ubuntu on the same hardware. Mostly Driver issues.

to that end, I have a PC that is running ubuntu 8.10 with no problems.

if by stable you mean don't change very often, then I would recommend CentOS. it is the enterprise stable, unbranded (free) version of RedHat.