CD-less upgrade (Was: BlueTooth Issues)

[Gilboa Davara]

On Tue, 2008-01-01 at 13:40 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Gilboa Davara wrote:
> 
> > 0. Backup. A faulty upgrade may kill your data. I'm serious. (And F8's
> > upgrade is known to be, err, sensitive...). Keep in mind that in
> > general, a fresh install (no matter what OS you are using) tends to work
> > better (cleaner, faster, etc) then an upgrade.
> 
> I completely disagree.
> Upgrade and install both work exactly the same.
> Have you actually tried both, or do you just _know_?

Know. (dep-solve bug)

... Beyond that, I once (RH8?) suffered from a kernel OOPS during an
upgrade - left me with a dead OS. Since then, I never attempted to do an
upgrade on a live system. (Though I continue to test the upgrade
procedure on VM's for the sake of my co-workers)

Other then that, doing a fresh install + manual migration (configuration
files, etc) is actually faster then the upgrade option. (And gives you a
cleaner OS - especially if you are using 3'rd party repositories.)

P.S. I once lost a Debian installation due to a simple upgrade. (3->4)
This is not a Fedora/RH-only problem.

> 
> I don't know what you mean by "your data",
> but /home should be on a separate partition,
> not affected by upgrade or install.

Doing -anything- on live OS (be that upgrade, or risky maintenance)
without a recent backup is a job-altering-decision.

Lose all your data once (due to a failed upgrade/installation/kernel
crash) and you'll never make this mistake again. 

> 
> As I recall, the OP was worried that the new system might not work.
> In that case he would be better advised to do an upgrade, IMHO.
> He still has the chance to do a clean install if there is a problem.
> In other words, he gets two bites at the cherry.
>
> A better solution, if he has the space,
> is to do a clean install on another partition,
> so that old and new systems are both available.

As I said, it's far easier (... and faster!) to do a fresh install on a
spare partition and migrate all the configuration files to the new
installation.

It usually takes me ~90 minutes (including the actual installation over
NFS) to switch from F-N to F-N+1.

> 
> Personally, I would download and burn the KDE Live CD,
> which will give some idea if Fedora 8 will run on his system.

Doubt it.
The basic LiveCD is radically different from a fully updated (and well
configured) F8 installation.

- Gilboa