Installing fedora while running fedora?

[Rodd Clarkson]

2010/12/3 "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" <johannbg at gmail.com>

> On 12/03/2010 12:55 AM, Rodd Clarkson wrote:
> > Can you do the same thing just running vanilla Fedora?  This would be
> > a really useful feature, but I'm not seeing any information on how to
> > do it.
>
> No you can not.
>
> Live cd works in that way that all the components are uncompressed and
> loaded into memory as needed from the Live CD and everything is running
> from there.
>
> I don't particular see the usefulness in that feature care to explain
> what kind of behaviour you are looking for a bit more?
>
> Hypothetically you could do some *partition magic* given that you had
> sufficient free storage space to over install Fedora over currently
> running system but you would still need to *reboot* to the new install
> which kinda renders it pointless that is if that was what you where
> looking for


Okay, just to clear things up, I'm not trying to install Fedora in a
currently running fedora.

I'm trying to install Fedora on other partitions while still running.

While I love that you can update from one version of Fedora to the next,
it's my experience that it's not completely smooth and some things break.
For example, often getting VMWare to work (compilation issues usually) is a
hard one, and I prefer to move from one installation to a different one so
that I have something to fall back to that's known to work.

On my laptop I usually have 2 fedora installs, the one I'm moving into, and
the one I've been using already.  At the moment I've got F13 and F14.
VMware still isn't working in F14 (compilation issues) but I need VMWare for
bookkeeping, so it has to work.  However, to install F14 took about 2 hours
(with updates coming in while the installer worked) and that's 2 hours of
downtime I don't need (as I'm unable to do anything with my laptop while I'm
installing F14).  This got me to thinking that it would be great if I could
have installed F14 while still running F13.  If I could do this I'd actually
bother to (and have easy access about) use the other repos (rpmfusion and
spots firefox4 and chromium repos) while installing instead of having to do
this later.

My MythTV box works like a dog and finding time to install a second distro
is hard enough, let along finding time between shows that need taping. And
(and this is the kicker) I don't need an upgrade that goes wrong and have to
explain to my wife she can't watch TV because I upgraded distros and broke
it.  The MythTV is truly production.  So if I could install f14 (it's
currently using f12 which is EOL) while it's running I could get this done
while (literally) watching TV and then figure out the final tweaks without
having to find time to install and then update (and then do all the other
little bits and pieces).

Are these two examples good enough?

I only ask because it occurred to me that what I wanted to do was basically
what you can do in the LiveCD and it made me wonder why the installer on the
DVD had to be booted and why you couldn't run it.  I guess there are some
issues with using already mounted partitions that are shared (/home for
example) but it would be truly useful if I could put the DVD in the drive,
run something inside my running Linux distro and install it to another bit
of the harddrive (instead of having to sit by watching the installer run
software and leaving me without access to my system while it happens).


Rodd
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