Upgrading from FC4 to Kubuntu???

[Jonathan Hutchins]

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.)