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
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