Plan to Upgrade RH9 to FC2

[quo_vadis]

Hi all,

I have an IBM T22 Laptop on which I am planning to install FC2. Before I do so however I would like to clarify a few doubts:

1. I want to run FC2 with as minimal a set of programs as possible and with only XFCE as the window manager but with Nautilus as the filemanager. Is this possible to do without having to install the Full GNOME DE? What issues will I face during upgrades?

2. I dont have access to a DVD or CD burner so I plan to install RH9 first (I have the disks with me) and then upgrade to FC2 using yum. Is it possible to do a minimal install of RH9 and then install yum and upgrade to FC2? Do I need to pay special attention to any partitioning schemes? I figure that since I am doing a fresh RH9 install without X the XFree86 to Xorg change issues should be bypassed and as I will be having all vanilla packages, the upgrade should be relatively painless.

3. While upgrading to FC2 via yum, if I do a yum upgrade does this reinstall the whole system or just upgrade the packages already installed ? Basically I dont want it to install GNOME/KDE etc only XFCE which as I understand it, is not easily done with FC2?

4. Another plan is to download the DVD ISO to another windows machine and then upgrade RH9 to FC2 via the network using the ISO. But I really dont know if that is possible. Any pointers will be a great help. Is it possible to mount an ISO which is on another machine as a loopback?

The major constraints are the RAM (256MB) and HD space (~20GB) on the machine. It is a PIII 900 MHz machine.

Will be very grateful for any help.

Regards,

[Picomp314]

xfce kind of relies upon gnome and kde so it can run programs that you would normally run under the respective window manager

the problem installing over the network with a windows machine and a linux machine that is being installed upon, is that the methods for installing it are limited to ftp http and nfs
ftp and http do not support doing this directly with an iso
nfs does, but nfs servers are not that common on windows, and are often hard to configure

[Jman]

You're chances of an easier upgrade of so many packages are better with using the installer rather than yum, in my opinion.

yum update and yum upgrade, directly from the man page:
update If run without any packages, update will update every currently
installed package. If one or more packages are specified, Yum
will only update the listed packages. While updating packages,
yum will ensure that all dependencies are satisfied. If no
package matches the given package name(s), they are assumed to
be a shell glob and any matches are then installed.
upgrade
Can take packages as arguments, upgrade is just like update
except that it includes package obsoletes in its calculations -
this makes it better for distro-version changes, for example:
upgrading from somelinux 8.0 to somelinux 9. *deprecated* - this
command may be removed in the future.
xfce is not in the installer list as far as I know, but it is on the Fedora 2 CDs.

You could copy all the rpms to the hard drive like this (http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-9-Manual/install-guide/s1-begininstall-net.html) and run a web or ftp server on that machine. When you first boot the installer enter linux askmethod and select the apropriate one.

Hopefully one of these solutions work.