Huge Upgrade

Deanimator · #1 30th August 2010, 01:41 AM

I've been running Fedora Core 3 on a P4 450 as a personal Samba server and domain controller. It's worked so well that I never gave any thought to upgrading.

The other night, I noticed that Up To Date wasn't working, and that Firefox was acting strangely. I made the FC 13 installation disks, whereupon I found out that the system didn't have enough memory.

Rather than mess with the P3 450 any more, instead I swapped main boards and decided to do an upgrade.

It it even possible to do an "upgrade" from 3 to 13? Is it possible to maintain my existing partitions/settings. I've backed up everything that I'd be too unhappy to lose. It's a two drive system and the second is nothing but data, none of it catastrophic to lose, but at least disappointing.

Any suggestions? I'd like to keep the data and settings on the primary disk, but won't cry if I can't.

Thanks.

William Haller · #2 30th August 2010, 03:32 AM

I've upgraded through every release from FC1 on, but the key thing is that I do it every release. Don't even think of trying to upgrade from 3 to 13 in one step. There have been way too many changes.

Save your data - be careful on the fresh install to pay particular attention to preserving the data partitions. I'd copy the files that I changed over to a safe spot. If you had the disk space (or a removable USB drive or flash drive, you could move the data there temporarily just to be sure you didn't lose anything.) There have been many horror stories of people who don't read all the prompts very carefully and have the Linux Volume Manager allocate all free disk space on all partitions for the new Linux system. It should be safer, but you can only prompt people so many times before they start to complain you're making it too safe. Software writers can't win.

sonoran · #3 30th August 2010, 03:41 AM

I don't think a 3-13 leap would have much chance of succeeding; leapfrogging any version was discouraged until recently. The downside of "giving it a shot" is that your upgrade might appear to work but would be plagued by hard-to-diagnose problems. As long as you're prepared to pull the trigger early on a fresh re-install, it would be interesting to see what would happen in an upgrade attempt, though.

Deanimator · #4 30th August 2010, 03:47 AM

Thanks to both of you.

I'm going to blow away the system, and leave the data on the second drive.

I expect that a lot of stuff has changed drastically, particularly Samba.

marko · #5 30th August 2010, 03:58 AM

I don't understand how your updater was even working to just a few days ago, I thought Fedora 3 repos had been off the internet for ages.

Deanimator · #6 30th August 2010, 05:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by marko

I don't understand how your updater was even working to just a few days ago, I thought Fedora 3 repos had been off the internet for ages.

I'm not saying it did. I'm just saying I noticed it. I hadn't been paying much attention to it.

jpollard · #7 30th August 2010, 08:11 AM

You can't "upgrade" from FC3 to F13 - there have been several changes to
the update format that are incompatible. There are also partition size
requirements that have changed - especially on the /boot volume.

I couldn't even upgrade from F11 to F13 - the required free space in /boot
fails the requirements.

Another thing that will hit you is that the security model of the system has
changed - SELinux is not even fully compatible between F11 and F13
(gnome startup directories have changed labels slightly).

Deanimator · #8 30th August 2010, 05:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jpollard

You can't "upgrade" from FC3 to F13 - there have been several changes to
the update format that are incompatible. There are also partition size
requirements that have changed - especially on the /boot volume.

I couldn't even upgrade from F11 to F13 - the required free space in /boot
fails the requirements.

Another thing that will hit you is that the security model of the system has
changed - SELinux is not even fully compatible between F11 and F13
(gnome startup directories have changed labels slightly).

I ended up punting. I blew away the primary drive, and kept the secondary, which was the data drive.

I installed Samba 4 and just printed out the How-To. I'll probably spend the next few days getting Samba configured and working right and setting up a VPN.

The graphical disk management tool tells me I've got bad sectors. I'm still trying to deal with that.

jpollard · #9 30th August 2010, 08:20 PM

I also have problems with HP printers - they don't work (bug #616613)

pedora · #10 21st October 2010, 04:35 AM

How much free space is required then?

I guess an upgrade of F10 to F13 is out of the question or ill-advised, then, huh?

jpollard · #11 21st October 2010, 12:51 PM

It's practically impossible.

The RPM database has changed format which prevents the upgrade from
being anything but a total reinstall.

The only thing you can do is get a list of packages you have installed and
reinstall them after going to F13.

BTW, the printers seem to be working now.