FC2 to FC3 or FC4 upgrade

[Mark Knecht]

On 7/8/05, Rick Stevens <rstevens at vitalstream.com> wrote:
> 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.

Thanks Rick. Good inputs.

Maybe before I start the change over it would make sense to set up
those command line options, see the existing 2.6 kernel boot that way,
do the switch, boot safely, and then put them back in? A few extra
boots doesn't bother me that much.

Thanks to all others who have taken the time to answer on this. I've
downloaded FC4 iso's and will burn then this afternoon.

Cheers,
Mark