Upgrade from FC6 to FC11

[Jussi Lehtola]

On Fri, 2009-07-10 at 10:17 +0200, Roberto Ragusa wrote:
> Jussi Lehtola wrote:
> > On Thu, 2009-07-09 at 23:30 +0200, Roberto Ragusa wrote:
> 
> >> Because I have a couple of FC5 servers, and I could upgrade through
> >> the odd releases 5->7->9->11.
> > 
> > It should be rather straightforward to upgrade them to CentOS 5.3, you
> > should be able to do it with yum. If they're 64-bit boxes you may have
> > to remove some .i386 packages before the transaction goes through.
> 
> It is a little puzzling that when someone asks on a fedora ML how to
> upgrade Fedora, the answer is often "upgrade to CentOS instead".
> Apart from the dangerous reinforcement of the "Fedora is not for
> real stuff" myth, I wonder why CentOS (or RHEL), which are based
> on Fedora can upgrade Fedora->CentOS when Fedora can not
> guarantee Fedora->Fedora.
> I mean, if there are scripts to convert inittab to upstart, etc.,
> they take life in Fedora and then are included in RHEL, right?

The reason is that RHEL 5 is based on Fedora 6, so the upgrade should
work out smoothly. Also if you haven't updated the machine so far, it's
best to update to a distribution that still has many years of support to
come. The software you have installed manually in FC5 should still work
in CentOS 5.

If, on the other hand, you really want to stick with Fedora, I'd do a
complete reinstall since that is the quickest way to do the upgrade
(doing 4 upgrades is *really* slow). Besides, that way you get a clean
system and all of the advantages of the new ext4 file system.

If you want to try your luck with the successive upgrades, you still
might end up with a bit of a broken system, since you will probably have
to recompile the software you have installed manually. Plus, you might
end up with some trouble with the upgrades themselves.
-- 
Jussi Lehtola
Fedora Project Contributor
jussilehtola at fedoraproject.org