yeah fedora 8 to fedora 9 without losing a personal file

[d_sims]

I like fedora but find the update process to be from tedious, to downright distro-shopping. I finally got my fedora box updated to fedora 9 from fedora 8. Now I am sure this is covered by many but here is how I got this done on my pc I didn't want to put this in the tutorials because it is more of a how not to update than a how to.

I started with anaconda, but after the reboot and being routed to console login and not KDE4 I got to thinking anaconda made a cameo in the garden of eden. I am not bashing anaconda at all. I don't know if anaconda is preupgrade or vise versa I could even care less.

So I was faced with a console login screen, and chose to login and go directly to su.

After the horror of finding that I could not view fedora forums through "links" I made a google bookmark and proceeded to do what I do best and read. Upon reading and finding where my /etc/yum.d directory is I went to it and opened up the fedora.repo and fedora-updates.repo and changed all the 8's to 9's. and tried a yum update -y.
In the process of updating I did download the rpm's for yum python python-libs and python-dev for fedora 9 into a file called rpm in my Desktop directory and rpm -Uvh them
like this rpm-Uvh *.rpm while in the rpm directory. Now I didn't do this all in one day I am a trial and error kind of person.

I found that if you have xlrunner you will have to remove that before updateing or you will be reminded that xlrunner conflicts with firefox2 after that still with a fear of failure I used yum --disablepresto --obsoletes update and to my surprise it went through and on my /sbin/shutdown -r now I was booting into fedora 9. Time in 2-6 hour days. But I am not learnded.

[marko]

you can easily upgrade Fedora now via "preupgrade"

Install preupgrade in the 'old' distribution

yum install preupgrade

then when the new distribution of Fedora is released run preupgrade as root

It's still a good idea to back up your disk but the upgrade is done in place, that is the
home directory and filesystems are left as is. It's best if your /boot partition is at least 150Meg to 200Meg because some stuff is put in there during the process but it's not
essential.

[GreyWizzard]

Originally Posted by marko

you can easily upgrade Fedora now via "preupgrade"

Install preupgrade in the 'old' distribution

yum install preupgrade

then when the new distribution of Fedora is released run preupgrade as root

It's still a good idea to back up your disk but the upgrade is done in place, that is the
home directory and filesystems are left as is. It's best if your /boot partition is at least 150Meg to 200Meg because some stuff is put in there during the process but it's not
essential.

Marko,

You got my attention. Is there a thread or post or anything else on this that I can read up on a little? A "How To" with a step-by-step would be wonderful, but I don't mind doing a little reading if I must.

Not to take anything away from d_sims, but I'm not so sure I can follow his steps so easily. He claims to be "not learnded" but I hope that is not so. If it is, then I am plum down right stoooooopid.

[d_sims]

Um! I did use preupgrade about three days ago!
And it made me feel stewpid. lol
more of a concern was not being able to view fedora forum with links from console

[marko]

Originally Posted by GreyWizzard

Marko,

You got my attention. Is there a thread or post or anything else on this that I can read up on a little? A "How To" with a step-by-step would be wonderful, but I don't mind doing a little reading if I must.

The preupgrade wiki page:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PreUpgrade
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/PreUpgrade
https://fedorahosted.org/preupgrade

There are many threads in the forum, just search on "preupgrade" but there's no really good How-to for it that I've found yet.
I did four preupgrades and two had trouble and it was the same problem in both cases and should be fixed by now I think. In my two failure cases, the hosts preupgraded fine but the first time I did a kernel update after the upgrade something caused the grub to be misconfigured so I had to use grub-install to fix it.

[d_sims]

Basically what I was trying to say is if preupgrade does not work as expected and you are reduced to a console that all is not lost, you do not have to reinstall fedora 9 from scratch. well to me anyways it seems that an upgrade option should take into effect all the variables that could otherwise make the upgrade process null. It is always a touchy subject when talking about a package and I try not to complain because you always have to appreciate the time someone takes to make a rather lengthy process simplified. As always the variables only show themselves with error reports and to expect something to work flawlessly on every machine is next to impossible, but preupgrade is a step in the right direction and with time should mature into a very robust package for upgrading fedora.

[GreyWizzard]

Originally Posted by marko

The preupgrade wiki page:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PreUpgrade
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/PreUpgrade
https://fedorahosted.org/preupgrade

There are many threads in the forum, just search on "preupgrade" but there's no really good How-to for it that I've found yet.
I did four preupgrades and two had trouble and it was the same problem in both cases and should be fixed by now I think. In my two failure cases, the hosts preupgraded fine but the first time I did a kernel update after the upgrade something caused the grub to be misconfigured so I had to use grub-install to fix it.

Marko,

Thanks for the links.

Finally got some time to do some reading. As you said, there are many threads in the forums about it, but none with any really usable information.

In my reading I can't help but notice that the entire process still requires a network connection in order to be able to complete. Curious, do you know if it will allow a wireless connection at this point? I see that part of what was listed in the description was a configuration of the network interface but it did not specify which.

Have you seen anything on this in your search?

[marko]

Originally Posted by GreyWizzard

Marko,

Thanks for the links.

Finally got some time to do some reading. As you said, there are many threads in the forums about it, but none with any really usable information.

In my reading I can't help but notice that the entire process still requires a network connection in order to be able to complete. Curious, do you know if it will allow a wireless connection at this point? I see that part of what was listed in the description was a configuration of the network interface but it did not specify which.

Have you seen anything on this in your search?

Yes, a wireless connection that results in internet access so that yum repositories are reachable is all it needs. If you're doing yum updates now on that wireless connection then it should work ok. preupgrade also needs a good sized chunk of disk space under /var to put the packages.