I am installing Fedora Linux on older machine. I have been having troubles with Fedora 18 install dvd that I burn not booting in the machine. I tried three different burn tools and even redownloaded the iso.

So I have an old Fedora 13 dvd that does boot in the machine and I am going to install that. I do want to upgrade to 17 or 18. So my question is this: once I have Fedora on the machine, how can I upgrade from 13 to a newer release? I do have the ISO imaged to a USB stick that I also tried to have the machine boot to, but it didn't work. Can I install 13, and then once that is working, use the the USB through 13 to install something newer?

Thanks

On an older machine CentOS 6.4 is likely a better choice than fedora

also going from fedora 13 to 18 is likely to leave you with a computer that will not boot

please post the computer specs
for example i have ScientificLinux 6.3 running " mostly" fine on a 12/13 year old computer
the "mostly" is the ancient Nvidia Gforce2 card
this is a
Pentium 4 CPU 1.9 ghz ( from 2000)
1 gig ram
Gforce2 3d card
extra added usb2 card ( not original)
2 usb1 ports
3.5 in "floppy" drive

Don't bother installing Fedora 13. The third-party repositories no longer support it, so you won't get any media codecs. If you like the look and feel of Fedora 13, try getting Fuduntu. That's an excellent distro forked from Fedora. It looks more like Fedora 13 than Fedora 18 does and is quite undemanding: it will run happily with a P4 and 512MB RAM.

If your computer has less memory or a pre-P4 processor, come back and I'll tell you what will run. Pentium I and 128MB is quite possible!

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for the replies John and David. Here are the specs of the computer:

Intel P4 2.53 GHz
1024 MB DDR SDRAM (1GB)

2 hard disks: 50GB and 80GB
CD ROM , Samsung CD-R/RW Sw-248F
Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-107D

Also thinking about the install media. It booted to the "official" Fedora 13 DVD but when I put in the DVDs that I burned with Fedora 18 or OpenSuSE 12.3, I get the error that tells me "strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility". I wonder if the media is bad, the drive is going, or I am doing something wrong when burning the iso images from a Windows machine.

opensuse 12 will not run on that old system
even the now DEAD opensuse 11.2 will not run well

I tried a few years back on my old computer , installing opensuse11.2
it installed BUT just opining the home folder from the desktop took 30 seconds
and booting took over 5 min to just get to the login screen and another 5 min. to lode the desktop

both fedora and especially !!! opensuse NEED a lot of system resources

1 gig ram is listed as the min. BUT 4 gig ram is really NEEDED


for a P4 CPU CentOS 6.4 32 bit is likely your best bet .

The DVDs should boot, if your Fedora 13 one did. Something's gone wrong with the burning. It's probably a silly question, but have you checked that the Windows software hasn't just dumped the iso files onto the disks?

Few KDE distros will run well on a single-core processor and 1GB, but SUSE is probably going to do worse than the others! If you actually want KDE, try Exe Linux: that uses Trinity, a fork of KDE3 that's far less demanding than KDE4.

Thanks. I checked the DVDs, they are the 'expanded' discs, not just the iso on the dvd. Good thought though.

More thoughts. Did you burn the new DVDs on a different computer to the old DVD? It may be that the old computer only reads disks burnt on an older drive. In theory there should be no difference, but such things do happen. Make sure you burn at the minimum speed, too.