FC2 to FC3 or FC4 upgrade

[Rick Stevens]

Mark Knecht wrote:
> Hi,
>    I wonder what experience people here have with upgrading an FC2 box
> to newer FCx revisions. Is this something that can, in general, be
> safely accomplished using the FCx install CDs? What tricks do I need
> to know about to do an upgrade? Frankly I've never done one but rather
> have always done complete installs from scratch. I'm tired of doing
> that and just want a clean, simple, plug in the disk and one hour
> later it works like it always has but it's a new release.

Generally, FC2 to FC3 or FC4 should be fairly painless, however going
from something earlier (FC1, RH9, RH8.0, etc.) can cause grief since
you'd be going from a 2.4 kernel to a 2.6 kernel.  You may also run
into gcc problems (v2.96 vs. v3.x), glibc issues and others.  So,
old 2.4-kernel systems should use fresh installs of FC2/3/4.

Also beware that acpi/apms handling is RADICALLY different between FC2
and FC3.  If your machine doesn't boot after the upgrade, add "acpi=off"
to the boot command line.  It appears that the 2.6 kernel also handles
broken BIOS APIC setups better, so the need for "noapic" on SMP kernels
for AMD machines isn't as necessary as it was.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-            Beware of programmers who carry screwdrivers            -
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