Live upgrade from FC5 to FC6 successful, FC7 next

[stan]

For documentation purposes and web searches.  Not FC7 yet, but
applicable.

Ran an upgrade from FC5 to FC6 using the method described here
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq
with terrific results.

Haven't used the FC5 system for 7 months.  Upgraded to latest versions
of everything, 374 packages, took a few hours.

Then cleaned up the rpmnew and rpmsave as described in the link above.

Switched repositories also using the commands from the wiki for Fedora
and from here
http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-fc6.html#yum
(Thanks Mauriat).  I had to use the version for Fedora C(omprehensive) 7
for the livna gpg key as it did not work with the FC 6 version.
http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-f7.html#yum

Then just run yum upgrade.
With 2141 packages it took approximately 1 hour to download headers.
There were only 5 dependency failures.  This is phenomenal!

Error: Missing Dependency: libgcj.so.7 is needed by package eclipse-pydev 
Error: Missing Dependency: libgnutls.so.12 is needed by package
samba-swat 
Error: Missing Dependency: libgnomecanvaspixbuf.so.1
is needed by package gtkhtml
Error: Missing Dependency: libgnutls.so.12 is needed by package samba
Error: Missing Dependency: mono-core = 1.1.13.7-3.fc5.1 is needed by
package mono-basic

Unfortunately it took me 4 total tries to correct them.  The
solution was to delete the individual package and dependencies.  There
were only three dependencies.  On the last try I discovered the
gpg problem with livna.
yum doesn't keep any state until you get through the dependency stage,
so it was a very long test cycle, 1 hour each trial as the headers
were downloaded.

>From here on there were no issues, just a long wait.  It took
approximately 10 hours to download all the packages, and approximately
3 hours to install them.  The downloads automatically rotated among 4
mirrors.  If I was going to do it this way again, I would use the
baseurl method described below to select 4 mirrors that were close and
fairly lightly loaded and reasonably fast.  Probably could run
overnight once dependency issues were resolved.

The system boots cleanly.  However, the wallpaper is missing in the
gui, and the format is still the fc5 format instead of the fc6 format.

In a month or so when the load on the fc7 mirrors is lower I will
upgrade this system to fc7 the same way.  However, instead of using yum
to get the packages I will use wget -c to download all packages in a
repository to the hard drive.  I'm not sure how to use that as the
repository for yum; it looks like it can be done with a baseurl
directive in the /etc/yum.conf.d/"main".repo file.  This should cut the
header iteration time to about 15 minutes though it won't help with
install time.  It will double hard disk requirements.

All in all a very positive experience.

Thanks to everyone who made this possible, the documenters, the
dependency maintainers, and the good samaritans. I still can't believe
that with 2100+ packages and all their interwoven dependencies there
were only 5 dependency issues. Amazing.