No problems here, just a success (with minor pain) report. Upgrade RedHat 9 --> FC1 --> FC2 --> FC3 with Apt worked (kinda).
I had an old Compaq server with RedHat 9 on it. It was way out of date.... I wanted to upgrade the system to the latest stuff. I had "apt" installed from freshrpms.
I shutdown X-windows and used "service" to shutdown everything on the box except the networking and the getty's.
First I did an apt-get update and apt-get upgrade and apt-get dist-upgrade on RH9...
Then I edited the /etc/apt/sources.list and changed the entries for rh9 to fc1
Again I did an apt-get update and apt-get upgrade and apt-get dist-upgrade
This was pretty painless. I just had to manually do the apt-get install kernel (and select the most recent version). Then I edited /boot/grub/grub.conf and rebooted into rc2
I changed /etc/apt/sources.list to be fc2 instead of fc3 (wash rinse repeat) and again for fc3.
I did run into some issues where it would complain about removing a bunch of packages. This was a little tedious because I had to write down what packages were being removed, then proceed with the "apt" recommended path, then after apt finished I would run:
apt-get install <list of packages that were removed>
and sometimes it would belch about packages not being found
(they were obscure packages, so I ignored them and moved on)
I also ran into a problem with rpm at some point (around where librsvg2 got updated or glibc got updated). I found that I had to put:
%__dbi_cdb create cdb private mpool mp_mmapsize=16Mb mp_size=1Mb
into /etc/rpm/macros file and then it would work again, and I had to manually "rpm -e " the older versions of librsvg2 before apt would work again.
With all the downloading and disk activity, this took many hours to complete.
The other problem I found was that after going to a 2.6 kernel I had to *CAREFULLY* check mkinitrd and grub install before rebooting. Change from dev to udev broke some stuff, but I got it fixed.
When I finally rebooted I found that everything worked OK with the new 2.6 FC3 kernel, but I couldn't boot into my old kernels anymore.
Also I had to rebuild the X link in /etc/X11 to point at "/usr/X11R6/bin/Xorg" and I had to rerun "system-config-display"
to fix the Xorg.conf file.
Also somewhere along the way I lost bunches of RPM packages which broke lot's of things, but it was merely a matter of figuring out which RPM's were missing and apt-get installing them. Some of the RPM's that were missing were things like:
kdemultimedia
kdm
gdm
xdm
xorg-base-fonts
So when I rebooted the box to it's default runlevel 5 it would fail to
startup X, it took me a while to find the /etc/X11/X link and remember how to setup the Xorg.conf (with system-config-display) and then figure out that base-fonts were missing and then that the display-manager (login) packages were missing.
But all in all the upgrade worked!
All my desktop settings and icon's and things were basically the same,
although my background image had changed. mozilla picked up my old netscape settings for mail and web. gaim still worked.
I haven't found any other problems yet, and it has been a few days.
-Ben.
