Fedora upgrade procedure

Posted Nov 16, 2006 8:21 UTC (Thu) by Pc5Y9sbv (guest, #41328)
In reply to: Fedora upgrade procedure by sbergman27
Parent article: Fedora Core 6 review (Software In Review)

> Must be. And that's a good thing, because otherwise I'd have to call you on a bald-faced lie. ;-)
>

I don't know about using the install media in "perform an upgrade" mode, but I upgraded a laptop from FC3 -> FC4 -> FC5 simply by using rpm to install the new fedora-release package (switches versioning metadata for yum) and then running yum to pull in and upgrade all of the packages. I'd do an upgrade to FC6 right now as a test, but that old machine developed bad blocks and I reinstalled FC5 on a new harddrive since this episode...

I followed one of the how-tos I found in a quick websearch for "fedora remote upgrade yum", which documented a couple of gotchas and pitfalls. It worked very nicely, such that I was able to do it remotely from another continent with only two hiccups:

1) running out of disk during FC3->FC4 yum upgrade! had to delete some packages to make space, delete a few stragglers of the old FC3 packages, re-run yum upgrade, and get back to good working order

2) had to arrange for someone to plug it into ethernet since I wasn't feeling up to the task of trying to build new atheros drivers (out of kernel) in lock-step with each reboot into a newer kernel.

Truth be told, I suspect this method may be more reliable than the install media method... my experience with Fedora is that the brand-spanking-new release is always a bit fragile. This method, when applied carefully, allows you to upgrade directly to the later maintenance updates and avoid running the earliest versions of packages in the new release.

BTW, if you shopped carefully and got a Thinkpad that had good hardware support in the kernel, you wouldn't find it surprising to have newer versions of Fedora continue to work well with the same machine. ;-)