FC5 => F8 upgrade : advice?

[Beartooth]

On Tue, 16 Sep 2008 12:16:21 -0700, Nifty Fedora Mitch wrote:
	[...]
> Since this machine is new to you and old to someone else the obvious
> question is what needs to be preserved?
> 
> If you wish to preserve stuff then do CD/DVD upgrades one at a time.  In
> general a 5 to 6 upgrade works because 6 was tested in exactly this
> update case.  Same for 6 to 7, 7 to 8 etc....

	A private list, which several of us founded a dozen years back, 
has had a couple of outages in that time, while being hosted gratis by 
individual friends of members. I don't remember what went wrong the first 
time; the second time, it was a server that bit the dust, and the list 
passed the hat to buy the host another.

	Now that host has had to give up accommodating us, but the server 
is intact -- at my house. This has made getting the group back together 
much easier. Meanwhile, I had been getting my main email at a good rate 
from an electronic friend who is looking to make his customers less 
dependent on himself, and had also acquired a domain, which I wasn't 
using.

	My friend kindly arranged for both my account with him, and the 
list, to be switched to that domain, and the domain accommodated at a 
professional hosting company. I have the old server, because I'm retired 
and run linux; so I was the best person to get the archives off it, and 
sent to where they could join the list at the new host.

	Once that job's done, I've offered market price for the old 
machine, which no one else is likely to want, but which I can  use. So 
for the time being, preserving data is essential. And I've had mostly 
successes with upgrading Fedora, using media.

	In fact, I've just done an upgrade to F6, from a set of CDs which 
I managed to find again.

> If this is now your machine and there is no need to preserve anyting it
> is often best to just do a fresh install.   The advantage of a fresh
> install is that you do not have to work through a bazillion *rpmnew and
> other historic config files.  And, If I recall the default partition
> sizes way back in Fedora 2,3,4 times were too small for modern Fedora...
>  A clean install will get you partition sizes (including swap) that make
> sense today.

> With updates, one important command to know is "yum list extras".

	Interesting, very interesting; on my own newest machine, it 
showed me only a few things, like Opera and a couple of monitor drivers. 
On the former server, however, the list fills three or four screens of 
them -- many but not all of which I've installed. What do I have, now 
that I have the list?

	**Major Question** : 

	Now that the upgrade FC5 => FC6 has succeeded, with no apparent 
losses, do I want to run yum update, or proceed directly to F7??	

-- 
Beartooth Staffwright, PhD, Neo-Redneck Linux Convert
Fedora 8 & 9; Alpine 1.10, Pan 0.132; Privoxy 3.0.6;
Dillo 0.8.6, Galeon 2, Epiphany 2, Opera 9, Firefox 2 & 3
Remember I know precious little of what I am talking about.