Upgrade

[Fred Nastos]

On January 15, 2004 02:34 pm, Phil Schaffner wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-01-14 at 19:57, Fred Nastos wrote:
> >
> > First, run up2date on redhat 7, 8, or 9 to make it up2date.
> > Then get fedora-release-1-3.rpm from ftp.redhat.com.
> > Then run
> > rpm -Uvh fedora-release-1-3.rpm
> > yum -y update
> >
> > and this will upgrade your system (slowly, of course).  How does
> > this work?  Does fedora-release-1-3.rpm contain yum?
>
> No.  The xyz-release-m-n.rpm would be required for any RH-derived
> upgrade, but is primarily there to satisfy requires and provide release
> notes and first boot stuff.  Upgrade philosophies using various tools
> and repository types have been discussed in several recent threads (apt
> vs yum vs up2date...) so won't go into that here, but why not just do a
> CD or network upgrade using Anaconda - the "official" approach?  Chances
> of success are considerably higher, and potential time investment much
> lower.

Well, I just figured why bother burning some cds, if I can just do
it directly, on the fly.  It seemed more elegant.  See below for
what I ended up doing.

> (OT:  Have tried some of these approaches on a VMware testbed in an
> attempt to upgrade a RH-7.3 system to WBEL 3 - since Anaconda refuses
> to do it - without success.  Haven't found a good HOWTO for this with
> Google, nor on either this list or the WBEL lists.  Still looking.
> Probably time for a nice clean install and house-cleaning anyway, but
> all the old settings take a lot of time to recreate.)
>
> Good luck whatever road you take.  Would be interested in what you
> decide to do since many RH users are facing same dilemma.

Well, I tried the above procedure (right at the top of this email), and
it failed with a lot of dependency problems.  So I did some googling
and tried the method presented at:
http://www.brandonhutchinson.com/Upgrading_Red_Hat_Linux_with_yum.html
I ran into a few dependency problems with this also when I tried to
"yum upgrade" to redhat 9.  As suggested on the page, I tried
to "rpm --erase" every package that was causing problems (figured
I'd just reinstall them later).  But there was one dependency problem
that I couldn't get around (something about kdegraphics and a lib
file).  "rpm -erase kdegraphics" gave me a "kdegraphics is not
installed" error.  I didn't know how to get around this (I didn't
want to "rpm --force" anything), so I just burned some Fedora CDs.
The story's not done yet.

I put the CDs in, rebooted, and it recognized that I had an old
redhat installed.  I happily agreed to upgrade, but this also
failed!  If I remember correctly it was the same kdegraphics
dependency.  I had backed up all my critical data and it was getting
late, so I bit the bullet, and just did a fresh install, but kept
my /home and /data partitions unformatted.  This ran succesfully.

To my delight, after I set my user account details correctly when
I logged into my account with kde selected, I had the exact same
desktop as before.  That was my installation-highlight.  I spent
the past day reinstalling all the software and compilers, making
sure all the configuration files are right, transferring ssh
keys, etc. and now everything is running just fine.

Thanks