[YLUG] Grub

[Mike Cohler]

On 10/12/2007, Dr P Dupre <pd520 at york.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> Hi Mike
>
> I wanted to ugrade a FC4 to FC8, so you do not recommand to do it.
> In addtion this laptop has only 256M
> For the fedora list, I do not be receiving email from a list generating a
> lot of emails. Do you have some suggestions ?
>
> Regards
>
> Hi Patrick

In principle FC4 to F8 is perfectly reasonable - but see below.

OK I can certainly recommend two things if the laptop were mine:
Firstly if it is capable of getting some extra memory then you could
probably
get another 512MB for about £20 from crucial. That is what I would do first.
If I could not add memory to make at least 512MB then I know it will be
problematic for F7 onwards.

Secondly, once you have added memory to bring it up to 512MB or more then I
would do a clean F8 install in such a way that your main user areas are
preserved.  I spent a lot of time over the years honing upgrades, which I
would never do as a "yum upgrade" because in the end you spend much more
time fiddling with the upgraded system than if you would have done a clean
install and then bring back the users and other settings afterwards.

The key to upgrading via a clean install is to do adequate preparation
beforehand. Make sure that your /home and /opt are on a separate partition -
either one or two.
In fact you can have /home and /opt on separate partitions or in a single
partition. You can have one extra partition ifor /home and put /opt in as a
symlink to to /home/opt so all you need then is a single partition. I use
the gparted livecd for partitioning and it has not failed me yet - make sure
you use the most recent version if you use this facility. It will also
resize ntfs partitions if you have Windows.  If you have a machine with
Vista then you need to be more careful - and for shrinking Vista partitions
I would firstly use the Vista defragment facility and then the disk
management tool within Vista to shrink its own partition. Then use gparted
to set up your ext3 partitions for / and /opt as well as a suitable swap
partition. For the root partition I always make at least 14MB available. If
you have a small old disk then a replacement 7200rpm disk with a good
capacity makes a world of difference to response time once the system is
installed.

The other thing is to rsync ALL the stuff in /etc /var and /root to an area
in say /opt before re-installing a new operating system, or making a backup
to a separate disk - anywhere where you can still get access to the files
once a new system is installed into the / partition.

Then you can do a new fresh install into your root (/) partition and then
bring back the users and settings. My method is outlined in
http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~mdc1/fedora_install.html

With this method you can go from any version of Fedora to any newer one and
jumping from FC1 to F8 is also possible. But pay attention to the release
notes. For example in F7 if you use nfs there was a change to using rpcbind
which matters if you are setting up an nfs server.

The other thing is that although older Fedora systems are in principle not
supported once the n+1th version reaches maturity in fact people often run
servers which are apparently well out of date but sitting behind suitable
firewalls perfectly successfully and in reality critical security updates
are often possible. For example you will find that FC6 still has updates if
you check the repos in the past week or so. However I find it is a good idea
to install a new version once a year, and since my method rarely takes more
than 2.5 hours for the complete install plus re-configuring then I am happy
with this arrangement.

Obviously a server has more settings than a simple laptop usually (unless
the laptop is sitting in a basement acting as a server!)

Particularly for wireless and suspend the newest version of Fedora has had a
great deal of work done in these areas, much admittedly in the kernel, but
my own laptop was problematic with wireless until F8 with the way I do
things (see
http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~mdc1/fedora_wireless.html) and indeed this
laptop now suspends and wakes up without any fuss. In F7 it did not. My main
laptop has 512 MB of memory and works fine with F8. Another big improvement
with recent versions is that disk encryption using dmcrypt is now possible -
but with versions earlier than F8 this was simply not workable - and a
laptop with encrypted swap and user partitions is a great deal safer if
stolen than one with no disk encryption. It is still possible to use
fuse-encfs but it is tedious and makes machines very slow to respond.

I am responsible for one old machine with 256 MB memory and it has had
problems with F7 from the beginning - and continues to have problems - so I
won't be doing any re-installs on that machine unless I add more memory!

I hope this helps.


-- 
mike
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