Upgrades - updates - discuss?

John Summerfield debian at herakles.homelinux.org
Fri Oct 26 22:36:22 UTC 2007


Robin Laing wrote:
> I have use RedHat since 4.(something) and I like Fedora and hope to stay 
> with it.  The issue I have is downtime to do a full re-install and get 
> things configured.  In the past I have had problems with 
> missing/dropped/depreciate packages that have caused me headaches. 
> Issues with secondary repositories not creating new packages for the 
> latest FC until requested.  And all the other fun things that keep 
> showing up on this forum.  For home use, I cannot afford a second spare 
> computer.
> 
> With FC8 just about to come out, I am still waiting until I get F7 
> working at home for my wife to allow me to move her from FC4 on her 
> laptop.  I cannot take more than a day to do this and she needs all her 
> applications up and running.  But some of issues are are not the Fedora 
> teams fault, as the applications are provided by secondary repositories.
> 
> I came across this article that discusses rolling upgrades in contrast 
> to scheduled upgrades.
> 
> http://linux-blog.org/index.php?/archives/231-The-Absent-PCLinuxOS-Release-Cycle.html 
> 
> 
> Now this is a pro-PCLinux discussion but some of the points brought up 
> are interesting.  Of course they have been brought up on this and the 
> users lists before.
> 
> Reading about the changes to development in F8 and later versions of 
> Fedora, I wonder if it would be possible to look at doing a rolling 
> upgrade instead of a release?
> 

I don't normally "upgrade" by doing a fresh install. If I want to 
upgrade, I boot the media and upgrade.

I would not expect to have a system down for anything like a day; while 
there might be a touchup required, the basic apps (wordprocessing, web, 
email) can generally be expected to work.

My current desktop was a fresh install, I installed Scientific Linux 
5.0, then generated a package list from my old system, a crossgrade from 
FC3 to self-built Nahant-clone, and used that to run "yum -y install" or 
similar for everything.

I then copied my ~ from my old system, and that goes back at least as 
far as RHL 7.3 via Debian Woody/testing/Sarge.

I did that on a "new" system, so I had no downtime, I didn't change 
until I was happy.

In your case, I suggest you give Fedora a big fat miss, and use one of 
the RHEL clones.

I know of two continuing projects:
CentOS, a community project and the more popular
Scientific Linux, sponsored by US Govt.

I use White Box Enterprise Linux 4 on one system, but I don't know that 
the project is continuing. I don't think there's a reason to prefer it 
over CentOS. There was also Tao, but that merged with CentOS a while back.


Those are both supported for years, and probably you will install one 
and be able to run it until you replace the hardware.



-- 

Cheers
John

-- spambait
1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu  Z1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu
-- Advice
http://webfoot.com/advice/email.top.php
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375

Please do not reply off-list




More information about the fedora-test-list mailing list