| b0uncer |
04-13-2008 12:37 PM |
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.
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