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From: George Orwell on 11 Jul 2010 22:43
I have installed a few distros on a blank disk before.
Now I have an old PC with Fedora installed, and wish
to update to newer Fedora.
If I get a Fedora DVD for a newer version, can I do an
upgrade installation that updates Fedora (and packages)
without reformating the disk?
BTW it ext3 partition without LVM rubbish.

Il mittente di questo messaggio|The sender address of this
non corrisponde ad un utente |message is not related to a real
reale ma all'indirizzo fittizio|person but to a fake address of an
di un sistema anonimizzatore |anonymous system
Per maggiori informazioni |For more info
https://www.mixmaster.it

From: unruh on 11 Jul 2010 23:39
["Followup-To:" header set to comp.os.linux.setup.]
On 2010-07-12, George Orwell <nobody(a)mixmaster.it> wrote:
> I have installed a few distros on a blank disk before.
> Now I have an old PC with Fedora installed, and wish
> to update to newer Fedora.
> If I get a Fedora DVD for a newer version, can I do an
> upgrade installation that updates Fedora (and packages)
> without reformating the disk?

Sure you can. Some problems however.
a) Your / partition may no longer be big enough to contain the new
distros programs.
b) The names of packages may have changed, so that the rpm system may
not know to update the package you have ( eg what was called gimp, may
now be gimp2, or vice versa, and it will have no idea that that package
should be upgraded)) This may be especially problematic with
dependencies.
c) You could screw up during the installation and have it reformat just
the partition containing all your data.

> BTW it ext3 partition without LVM rubbish.
>
> Il mittente di questo messaggio|The sender address of this
> non corrisponde ad un utente |message is not related to a real
> reale ma all'indirizzo fittizio|person but to a fake address of an
> di un sistema anonimizzatore |anonymous system
> Per maggiori informazioni |For more info
> https://www.mixmaster.it
>
From: Jean-David Beyer on 12 Jul 2010 10:12
unruh wrote:
> ["Followup-To:" header set to comp.os.linux.setup.] On 2010-07-12,
> George Orwell <nobody(a)mixmaster.it> wrote:
>> I have installed a few distros on a blank disk before. Now I have
>> an old PC with Fedora installed, and wish to update to newer
>> Fedora. If I get a Fedora DVD for a newer version, can I do an
>> upgrade installation that updates Fedora (and packages) without
>> reformating the disk?
>
> Sure you can. Some problems however. a) Your / partition may no
> longer be big enough to contain the new distros programs. b) The
> names of packages may have changed, so that the rpm system may not
> know to update the package you have ( eg what was called gimp, may
> now be gimp2, or vice versa, and it will have no idea that that
> package should be upgraded)) This may be especially problematic with
> dependencies. c) You could screw up during the installation and have
> it reformat just the partition containing all your data.
>
Because of this, be sure to do a backup of your existing system in a way
that permits you to restore needed files in case something goes wrong.

I make three total backups onto magnetic tape and verify them before
doing the upgrade. Actually, I do not do an upgrade at all, but a clean
install of the new version of the OS. Fortunately, my distro does an
upgrade of this type only every 18 months or so (often a bit longer),
and I usually skip every other one, because I hate doing it. I use a
distro (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) that supports each release for 7
years. (They do updates for bugs and security fixes as needed, which is
more frequently than 18 months.)

I am currently on RHEL 5, and I am considering going to RHEL 6 because
of significant improvements that have been made to the postgreSQL dbms
that I use. But otherwise I would wait for RHEL 7.

--
.~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642.
/V\ PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939.
/( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org
^^-^^ 10:00:01 up 4 days, 18:46, 3 users, load average: 4.20, 4.39, 4.51
From: Stefan Patric on 12 Jul 2010 15:14
On Mon, 12 Jul 2010 04:43:01 +0200, George Orwell wrote:

> I have installed a few distros on a blank disk before. Now I have an old
> PC with Fedora installed, and wish to update to newer Fedora.

How old a PC? What are the specs? What version of Fedora is installed
on it? What version do you want to upgrade to?

> If I get a Fedora DVD for a newer version, can I do an upgrade
> installation that updates Fedora (and packages) without reformating the
> disk?

Maybe. If the version difference of the old and the new Fedoras is
greater than two, that is, for example, you have Fedora 10 and want to
upgrade to 13, a difference of 3, chances of success are slim. If you
have 9 or less and want to upgrade to 12 or 13, forget it. Do a clean
install.

Also, your hardware specifications must meet the minimums for the new
version.

> BTW it ext3 partition without LVM rubbish.


Stef
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