Since Fedora Legacy Project has gone belly up, I've been rethinking what to do with the workstation my daughter (a high school senior soon to be college student) uses. It currently has FC4 installed. I'd like to move her to Ubuntu (specifically kubuntu because she likes KDE) but I'm not sure if I can "ugprade" to it from FC4. I'm going to backup all of her files and photos to a CD or DVD, but I'm afraid I'm going to miss something (and I'd rather not back up the entire hard drive if I don't have to since the OS or distro won't matter any longer).
Has anyone ever done this? Upgrade from one distro to another?
Or do I have to just wipe the hard drive and start from scracth (like I would if it had Windows XP installed)?
Happy New Year!
Jon Moss
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I'd back up /home, /etc, and /var if you don't want to backup the whole HD. Doing a major change like Fedora->Kubuntu, I'd recommend cleanly parititoning and formatting the HD even if you don't technically need to.
I've done this a few times in a few different ways. You definitely don't want to try to "upgrade" to a different distribution. Even when Mandake first diverged from Red Hat it was a bad idea, and almost certain to result in an unusable system.
The other thing is that Ubuntu uses a different package tracking system than Red Hat/Fedora, it doesn't use RPM, so it wouldn't be able to tell if anything were installed in the first place, and would most likely do a new install over the existing one, possibly leaving unused cruft all over the place. Ubuntu puts files in different places too, so you could end up with a real mess. (Of course, it's possible that the installer script is smart enough to deal with this, but I wouldn't trust it.)
If your system and /home partitions are different, it's usually a good idea to not just delete the system files, but to go ahead and format the system partitions. No idea why, but I've seen that make a difference for an upgrade within the same distro.
Besides backing up your /home directory, you might have things in /var/spool, like /var/spool/mail if you're running an MTA (sendmail, postfix).
It's also a good idea to do "rpm -Va" and back up any configuration files that have been changed from the original, so you can preserve any customizations you made. (If you haven't made any important changes to the system, you can skip that part.)
If you want to stay within the RPM universe and have a familiar operating system and structure, I would strongly recommend Mandriva 2007 (not Mandriva One). Network installs are a breeze if you have broadband and are quicker than downloading and burning the iso's. Mandriva has a LOT more software available than Fedora, and regularly makes backports of updated software packages, not just patches to the existing version. Their urpm* console-based package management system is great, and it's pretty easy to configure it for a good mirror (though it may take some trial and error to find a good one). Version upgrades within Mandriva are working extremely well.
I've run RedHat (from 2.1 - FC4), Mandrake/Mandriva from fairly early on, and I've recently tried Gentoo and Kubuntu, and for a desktop I'd pick Mandriva every time. It's been what I've used since I switched to a Linux desktop about four years ago, with a brief excursion into SuSE. (That's another RPM/SysV/RedHat based system, but I don't recommend it for non-commercial users.)
(That said, I wouldn't recommend Mandriva, especially 2007, for a server. Next one's going to be Ubuntu LTS.)
On Thursday 04 January 2007 19:58, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
I've run RedHat (from 2.1 - FC4), Mandrake/Mandriva from fairly early on, and I've recently tried Gentoo and Kubuntu, and for a desktop I'd pick Mandriva every time. It's been what I've used since I switched to a Linux desktop about four years ago, with a brief excursion into SuSE. (That's another RPM/SysV/RedHat based system, but I don't recommend it for non-commercial users.)
I have to recommend Gentoo for anyone who doesn't mind learning internal workings. Binary OS have too many problems with application availability, and while Gentoo adds some new scary issues (such as forseeing what programs you want to install a few hours in advance), it's at least a step in the right direction.
On Thursday 04 January 2007 19:19, Luke-Jr wrote:
I have to recommend Gentoo for anyone who doesn't mind learning internal workings. Binary OS have too many problems with application availability...
I haven't found anything significant that was available, or more current, in Gentoo than in *buntu and in Mandriva. Better yet, the binary packages work when installed, and I don't get stuck in a dependency upgrade lock because some required file won't build or isn't the right version.
True to it's "ricer" car image, Gentoo requires constant tweaking and fiddling, and will regularly break down on you. The only reason you learn about the process of compiling and building software is because the process breaks so often on Gentoo, and you can either go in and fix it or learn enough about what's wrong to patch it - usually a dumb error in a build file - yourself.
Nobody should kid themselves that using emerge is anything like building LFS, compiling and installing from a tarball, or the best practice, building your own binary .deb or .rpm files. Those tasks will teach you useful things about your system. Gentoo will just teach you to hate it because it's always broken.
On Friday 05 January 2007 01:50, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
On Thursday 04 January 2007 19:19, Luke-Jr wrote:
I have to recommend Gentoo for anyone who doesn't mind learning internal workings. Binary OS have too many problems with application availability...
I haven't found anything significant that was available, or more current, in Gentoo than in *buntu and in Mandriva.
Right... Well, I consider it a bit flawed when I find there is no Wireshark/Ethereal for *buntu...
Better yet, the binary packages work when installed, and I don't get stuck in a dependency upgrade lock because some required file won't build or isn't the right version.
You mean vice-versa?
On 1/4/07, Luke-Jr luke@dashjr.org wrote:
Right... Well, I consider it a bit flawed when I find there is no Wireshark/Ethereal for *buntu...
What do you mean? http://packages.ubuntu.com/edgy/net/ethereal ;)
Jon.
On Friday 05 January 2007 05:09, you wrote:
On 1/4/07, Luke-Jr luke@dashjr.org wrote:
Right... Well, I consider it a bit flawed when I find there is no Wireshark/Ethereal for *buntu...
What do you mean? http://packages.ubuntu.com/edgy/net/ethereal ;)
I mean 6.06, which is still the latest ShipIt CD
http://packages.ubuntu.com/dapper/net/ethereal It's in the universe repository, so it's an optional repository and an optional install.
Do you mean that it's not included on the install CD? If that's your only gripe about it, there's a lot of software that doesn't come on the installer CD for most distros unless you burn the whole Debian set...
Jon.
On 1/4/07, Luke-Jr luke@dashjr.org wrote:
On Friday 05 January 2007 05:09, you wrote:
On 1/4/07, Luke-Jr luke@dashjr.org wrote:
Right... Well, I consider it a bit flawed when I find there is no Wireshark/Ethereal for *buntu...
What do you mean? http://packages.ubuntu.com/edgy/net/ethereal ;)
I mean 6.06, which is still the latest ShipIt CD _______________________________________________ Kclug mailing list Kclug@kclug.org http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug
On Friday 05 January 2007 11:25, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
On Thursday 04 January 2007 23:44, Luke-Jr wrote:
I mean 6.06, which is still the latest ShipIt CD
If you want current versions and extended package selection, no distribution should go by what's on published CD's. What version of ethereal is on the currently shipping Gentoo CD?
The latest wireshark works on the oldest Gentoo profile.
On Friday 05 January 2007 11:53, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
On Friday 05 January 2007 11:41, Luke -Jr wrote:
The latest wireshark works on the oldest Gentoo profile.
Probably works on my Rh7.3 box too. My question is if you're going by what's on the published CD, what's on the published Gentoo CD?
No, I'm going by what's supported from an install from the latest published CD. And even installing from an ancient Gentoo CD could still yield an up-to-date system.
On Friday 05 January 2007 11:57, Luke -Jr wrote:
No, I'm going by what's supported from an install from the latest published CD. And even installing from an ancient Gentoo CD could still yield an up-to-date system.
That's because you update from the net repositories. Doing that with ubuntu would result in the same thing. Your comparing apples to orangutans.
On Friday 05 January 2007 12:42, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
On Friday 05 January 2007 11:57, Luke -Jr wrote:
No, I'm going by what's supported from an install from the latest published CD. And even installing from an ancient Gentoo CD could still yield an up-to-date system.
That's because you update from the net repositories. Doing that with ubuntu would result in the same thing. Your comparing apples to orangutans. _______________________________________________
Nope, I couldn't get wireshark from network repos either.
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