[SWLUG] Advice on upgrading Linux

[Telsa Gwynne]

On Sun, Jan 04, 2004 at 01:49:06PM +0000 or thereabouts, linlist2 at nwjones.demon.co.uk wrote:
> I am about to take the plunge and upgrade to Fedora. I have a magazine DVD.
> 
> I have a twin disk system one with windows the other with RH 7.2.
> My Linux disk is partitioned with separate partitions for things like home.
> 
> I plan to copy some chunks from my home directory onto the Windose 
> disk as a back up. Anything else I should save?

  * /var/spool/mail/username (or you lose mail you didn't save to somewhere)

  * Parts of /etc are often worth keeping around: XF86Config, ppp 
    settings, resolv.conf and so on.

/var/spool/mail/ , /etc and /home are the bits I back up. The
rest can look after itself, as far as I am concerned. In general,
as well as pre-upgrade.

> Any other hints would be very welcome particularly as to how I 
> avoid wiping data during the upgrade. If anyone needs to send me 
> personal email replies please either reply to the address in this 
> email or better send it to neil<at> butterflyguy.com

I have not done a 7.2->Fedora update, but I have done most of
the stages in between (7.2->7.3->8.0->9.0->Fedora.) I haven't
lost anything vital. Things I do remember: 

  * Font handling changes. You'll acquire fontconfig. 
  * Gnome is hugely different. It's supposed to be easier. 
  * Probably ditto for KDE. 
  * Gnome and KDE both set up by default to behave the same and
  have the same menus. 
  * Printing setup becomes CUPS, no choice about it, on Fedora. There
  is some sort of tool which migrates settings to CUPS, but it didn't
  work perfectly for me. 
  * Move to UTF-8-based filenames and locales. If you have filenames
  which used anything beyond ASCII in the names you'll see ? marks in
  them (but they still work and so on). I think most people weren't
  stupid enough to try to be clever with non-ascii filenames. Unlike
  me. I have an app which will correct filenames if you need it. (For
  contents, you use iconv.) 
  * I think the root directory for apache moved around. 

Bah, just grab the release notes for 7.3, 8, 9 and Fedora: it's
quicker than my memory.

I did not lose any data, and I just do upgrades rather than 
reinstalling and putting /home back where it is. Actually, I
did one fresh install and putting /home back. And I still
didn't lose anything. 

Can't speak for its behaviour towards Windows: never needed to
know here!

Telsa