upgrade from RH9 to Fedora

[Joe Beach]

Hi Don, 

On my home computer, I have been doing clean installs while preserving
my /home and /usr/local. It isn't hard to do if you have your disk
partitioned for it. My suggestion is to at least have separate
partitions for:

swap
/
/home
/usr/local

You should write down which partition has which contents so you aren't
wondering about it during the installation. When you do the new
installation, select "manually partition with disk druid" when it comes
up. A screen will appear that lets you pick which partition gets mounted
where, and gives you an option on each partition to either keep existing
data or reformat it. For /home and /usr/local, choose to keep the
existing data. For / and swap, choose to reformat. 

This will save your home directories and any software you installed in
/usr/local, though it won't save any modifications you have made to
system configuration files. It is worth noting, though, that if you do
things this way, you'll need to re-enter the users in the same order you
did on your previous installation or else manually define their user ID
numbers so the match those on the previous installation. Otherwise,
you'll end up having file permission problems. Not hard to correct, but
disconcerting when it happens.

And its a good idea to back up anything that is really valuable before
you do a new system installation. Multiple times. I've never lost
anything, but I don't want to be held responsible if someone else
does...

Joe Beach