Upgrade process for Fedora?

[griffisb at bellsouth.net]

I'm considering installing Fedora on a new laptop and wanted to know what the upgrade process is. I am not familiar with Red Hat, so familiarity with Fedora is nill. I do have some experience with Mandrake, SuSE and Debian,though.

If I install Severn (Test 2?), how would I upgrade to Severn (Test 3?) when it comes out? Would I need to download the ISOs and burn them to CD again? Or is there a Debian-like apt-get update, apt-get upgrade? When General Availability comes out in November, would I be burning another set of CD's? Is there a clean upgrade process, or would I have to wipe out my install and then install the new package from scratch?

I see that Severn comes with Open Office 1.0.2 (at least I think it does, based on the applications list). Is there an RPM for OOo 1.1, or would I download, untar and install from OpenOffice.Org? How do I find out the versions of Gimp, Scribus and GnuCash that Fedora ships with? 

Finally - I have DSL and a CD-R, so either upgrade process is fine for me - but I am building a laptop to ship to my sister. She lives 12 hours away, and would be on dial-up. My hope is to configure and mail a laptop to her by next week. I had been thinking along the lines of SuSE 8.2 (easy to use, good manual), Mandrake (although I break that often), or Debian (I have YET to get a clean Debian install, though - but I was thinking of doing a Knoppix to harddisk install to get around that problem).

Would it be expecting too much to install Fedora, burn CD's as it goes GA, then ship and talk her through the upgrade process? Since Fedora is based on RH 9.0 (if I read right), could I assume RH9.0 User Guides would be appropriate?