On Tue, 2008-01-01 at 13:40 +0100, Timothy Murphy wrote: > Gilboa Davara wrote: > > > 0. Backup. A faulty upgrade may kill your data. I'm serious. (And F8's > > upgrade is known to be, err, sensitive...). Keep in mind that in > > general, a fresh install (no matter what OS you are using) tends to work > > better (cleaner, faster, etc) then an upgrade. > > I completely disagree. > Upgrade and install both work exactly the same. > Have you actually tried both, or do you just _know_? Know. (dep-solve bug) ... Beyond that, I once (RH8?) suffered from a kernel OOPS during an upgrade - left me with a dead OS. Since then, I never attempted to do an upgrade on a live system. (Though I continue to test the upgrade procedure on VM's for the sake of my co-workers) Other then that, doing a fresh install + manual migration (configuration files, etc) is actually faster then the upgrade option. (And gives you a cleaner OS - especially if you are using 3'rd party repositories.) P.S. I once lost a Debian installation due to a simple upgrade. (3->4) This is not a Fedora/RH-only problem. > > I don't know what you mean by "your data", > but /home should be on a separate partition, > not affected by upgrade or install. Doing -anything- on live OS (be that upgrade, or risky maintenance) without a recent backup is a job-altering-decision. Lose all your data once (due to a failed upgrade/installation/kernel crash) and you'll never make this mistake again. > > As I recall, the OP was worried that the new system might not work. > In that case he would be better advised to do an upgrade, IMHO. > He still has the chance to do a clean install if there is a problem. > In other words, he gets two bites at the cherry. > > A better solution, if he has the space, > is to do a clean install on another partition, > so that old and new systems are both available. As I said, it's far easier (... and faster!) to do a fresh install on a spare partition and migrate all the configuration files to the new installation. It usually takes me ~90 minutes (including the actual installation over NFS) to switch from F-N to F-N+1. > > Personally, I would download and burn the KDE Live CD, > which will give some idea if Fedora 8 will run on his system. Doubt it. The basic LiveCD is radically different from a fully updated (and well configured) F8 installation. - Gilboa
