FC4->FC5 upgrade options

[Timothy Murphy]

Craig White wrote:

>> > One fact is never
>> > going to change though...a 'clean' install is going to be entirely more
>> > predictable than an upgraded installation.
>> 
>> How can you be so dogmatic?
>> The fact is, a "clean install" is going to fail completely on some
>> machines, so unless you call that "predictable"
>> I don't see how your statement can be true.
>> 
>> I've had 3 complete installs of RedHat and Fedora that have failed,
>> perhaps out of 50.
>> One was a SCSI-only machine,
>> and the other two were Sony Picturebooks.

> I have only had 2 installations that failed ever though and both seemed
> for good cause.
> 
> 1 - CentOS-4 (RHEL-4 clone) because Dell/Red Hat/LSI decided to remove
> support for Megaraid 2 cards. Had to build a kernel module and it's
> running fine, even today.
> 
> 2 - RHEL 7.1 - didn't support the motherboard SCSI (required a patch
> disk)
> 
> Now I know that FC-4 had trouble installing on some hardware and we know
> that just about everything was updated from original install disks of
> FC-4. I've just been doing this too long to base my commentary on FC-4.
> I pretty much consider the FC-4 installation disks an aberration and a
> nightmare that we all hope never gets repeated.

It seems to me our experiences are not too different,
so where we differ is the lessons we draw from them.

Personally, my top priority is that my laptop should work
after I install a new system.
I don't see myself as a developer,
but as a user for whom the computer is a tool.

I would have less than 75% confidence that a clean install would work
on all of my small but rather motley collection of computers.
(The Sony Picturebooks are the most likely source of trouble,
but I've also had problems with a SCSI-only desktop,
and I also had some difficulty installing FC-4 on an Athlon64 machine.)

I have about 95% confidence that upgrading will leave me
with workable machines.
(The upgrading may fail, but the machine will still work.)

So my advice, from my experience, is that if your top priority
is to have a computer working with the minimum amount of trouble
then you should upgrade rather than make a clean install.

Basically, when you do a clean install
you are betting that the kernel shipped with the distribution
will work on your machine.
That's not a bet I want to take.



-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland