Still trying to get Fedora Core...

Gerry Doris gdoris at rogers.com
Fri Dec 19 20:00:21 UTC 2003


>
> Gerry,
>
> Thanks for the response.  I'm struggling hard to make the transition away
> from MS and become wholly immersed in Linux.  I guess I'm still not
> sophisticated enough to know exactly how to upgrade from the yarrow .iso
> images.  Do you mean upgrade RH 9 from the Fedora?
>
> The language on the Red Hat site suggests Fedora is an improving branch
> off
> of RH 9.  I just want to keep up without having to uninstall and do a new
> installation of Fedora.  If I run disks from the Fedora .iso images will
> they detect what I already have installed and update only those parts that
> need updating?  RH 9 was my first Linux installation.  I love it, but I'm
> still facing a steep learning curve.
>
> Steve

Steve, I just upgraded a RH 9 box last Sunday to check out Fedora.  First,
upgrades are never as smooth as a clean install.  You will have some
fixing (hopefully minor to do) with an upgrade.  However, that said the
easiest way to proceed is to do the following:

1. download the three Fedora iso files.  These can be downloaded pretty
quickly if you have high speed internet directly from the fedora website.

2. burn the iso as images on three CD's.  I use xcdroast under linux or
Nero Burning under windows.  In any case, after you've burned a cd try and
mount the cd to make sure you really burned the image not just the iso
file.

3. make a back up of all your critical partitions just in case.

4. put cd 1 in your cd drive and reboot.  If you've got your box set up to
boot off the cd drive it should come up with the identical screen you had
when you installed RH 9 except it says it's fedora.

5. accept the offer to verify your media (all three disks).  This will
confirm that nothing was corrupted and perhaps cause a crash half way
through the upgrade.

6. the installer will notice you have a working system installed and ask
if you want to do an upgrade or a clean install.  Pick the upgrade option.
 It will upgrade all packages currently on your system with the new
versions along with any dependencies.  It will (should?) delete any other
packages that are no longer supported.

7. once you're done you will reboot and your new shinny fedora install
should come up.

8. run up2date to update any of the new packages that have been upgraded
since the iso's were posted.

On my system I couldn't upgrade mozilla since nautilis had been left.  I
had to manually remove this application (it's no longer supported but
wasn't automatically removed).

There were a few other minor problems as well.  For example, OpenOffice
wouldn't run until I removed the .openoffice file in my home directory. 
xmms stopped working but started again when I re-installed the rpm.  There
were about half a dozen of these sorts of things before fedora was fully
working.

The worst problem was getting printing to work again.  I was using LPRng
with RH 9 and fedora only uses CUPS.  I had to manually use the print
switcher to change over to CUPS.  I was then able to get local printing to
work but had to make another change to smb.conf to get my windows boxes to
print.  Help from this list was invaluable on this.

I suggest you do the upgrade but be prepared for a few surprises.  If you
got RH 9 working you shouldn't have too much problem switching to fedora. 
Ask for help if you run into a problem.

Gerry





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