worth upgrading/ installing?

Jim Cornette fc-cornette at insight.rr.com
Sat Mar 25 17:07:27 UTC 2006


hbrhodes wrote:
> anyone think or know if it is worth upgrading to FC5 from FC4?

I can barely remember FC4. FC5 seems worth upgrading in my opinion. 
Others might have different views however.

> 
> is it more worthwhile to do it a clean install?

Depending upon the intended usage for the installation, either choice is 
applicable to the desired outcome. I have one system where I want 
progressively update it but keep the basic aspects from before. It is a 
complex setup that I would not like to recreate. With the upgrade, I do 
now have a problem where I need to stop and restart the interfaces for 
the Ethernet cards. The system works fine other than that problem.
I could not apply a traditional upgrade on this via the installer and 
had to go about it piecemeal, I feared doing a fresh install due to the 
vested time that I committed to the installation historically.

Trying a fresh installation might not have succeeded on this particular 
computer. I do not want to risk this possibility.

On another system that I tried to do a fresh installation on, the video 
card (Intel 815 on board and an mga pci card as secondary) failed to 
allow me to install in graphics mode. The previous test 3 disk allowed 
this to be possible. This limited the choices for advanced boot loader 
options and the selection of xen not to be present. The trouble with the 
video was the installer tried to select the pci mga video card as 
primary but X was addressing the Intel card which is set to primary in 
BIOS. It just plain does not work for some hardware to do GUI 
installations even though the last version installed fine, even as 
recent as the last beta to the final release.


If you are interested in using xen to see if you can make virtual 
domains and similar new features work and have fun attempting to set 
them up. I think that a fresh installation is the best option.

You probably will have fewer problems related to previous versions 
performing tasks in different ways or launching processes in a different 
order. I believe the need to restart my Ethernet card in each boot is 
related to the "old way vs. the new way" processes, services and the 
like are launched. I'd rather live with the problem and investigate this 
further and straighten out it eventually. You might desire a just works 
approach though. It is impossible to realize wht method will just work 
for you, if any.

Just my view,
Jim

> 


-- 
Arnold's Laws of Documentation:
	(1) If it should exist, it doesn't.
	(2) If it does exist, it's out of date.
	(3) Only documentation for useless programs transcends the
	    first two laws.




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