[Sussex] Upgrading from RHEL to Fedora

[Paul Tansom]

Jon Fautley wrote:
> Richie Jarvis wrote:
>>Fedora Core is very very good at upgrading - just pop the install disk
>>in, and it will find, and upgrade your system without trashing it -
>>obviously make sure you make a backup of anything important first though!
> 
> That would be my recommended way of doing it. It should be possible with
> up2date, just replace the redhat-release RPM, and switch your up2date
> source to the Fedora repository, but I really wouldn't recommend it.
> 
> Binary upgrade from the CD's is the way to go - I think the FC installer
> should recognise RHEL.

I may give that a go on the third ('spare') machine. On potential
problem is that if all goes wrong and the decision is to go back to the
original setup I loose any updates that were installed (I won't go down
this path again, but I really don't see subscription to updates as a
good solution for the end user - unless there is a means to keep access
to all updates that were available when your subscription expired; as a
techy I guess I'd probably look into some means of mirroring them in
order to retain access, but this is nasty). I could, and may well,
simply clone the disk, but it will probably fall to 'if it fails then
reinstall Fedora from scratch' as the recommendation.

Of course in this case there will be a strong temptation to go for
Debian or Ubuntu - which is still tempting as I'm not 100% convinced
that Fedora is suited for an end user business desktop - changing too
frequently (especially for someone who runs the update on a regular
basis) - although I think Ubuntu may well fall in that category too.
With Debian stable being so up to date at the moment (more recent than
the existing RHEL WS 3 (which is on Evolution 1.4 iirc) this is very
tempting since it provides security updates only leaving version
upgrades to manual choice. There's still the question of how long till
the next release though!!! I don't think there's a distribution out
there that has quite cracked the ideal update policy yet, although it is
a nightmare of an issue given the sheer number of packages, versions and
interactions available - Windows has it easy, which makes you wonder why
it does it so badly ;)

-- 
Paul Tansom | Aptanet Ltd. | http://www.aptanet.com/