Fwd: Migration from RH 9 to Fedora

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Nov  6, 2003, Mike Coolin <mcoolin at orbitvista.com> wrote:

> How does one go about upgrading to Fedora from RH9?

About the same as from RHL8.0 to RHL9.

> Will my data be put at risk?

Sure.  Life is dangerous.  Any software may contain bugs.  Have your
backups handy.

That said, I haven't had to sacrifice any data to the Fedora gods, and
I've been testing it since early private betas :-)

> Will my applications contiue to function?

If they didn't rely on internals that might have changed, and didn't
have any bugs that might be exposed/hidden by small changes in memory
layouts, and they don't depend on any shared libraries that you might
no longer have around, then they should probably still work.

> While it appears that you need to install from CD, redhat seems to
> have gone out of thier way to not inform users how they can migrate
> safely from RH9 to any of the offerings of RH ES or Fedora.

Yeah, sure.  One click away from www.redhat.com is surely too long a
way :-)  Try `Migrate today' in the front-page, and you'll get to
http://www.redhat.com/solutions/migration/rhl/ 

> Am I alone in the finding that the migration section of the redhat site is
> seriously lacking in useful migration howto instructions.

Oh.  I see what you mean.  Well...  I suppose one way to do it is:

- install on a test box

- validate all the software you need and make sure it still works

- plan to put it in production

- migrate any data from the production box to the test box, and put it
  in production, taking the original box off-line

- keep the original box handy updated as a contingency plan, or as a
  test box for the next update

There are several other ways to do it, with more or less room for
disaster and with more or less test hardware.  It's all up to you.

I guess the instructions for the actual `install/upgrade' step are
sort of taken for granted.  RHL 9 has an installation guide, that
AFAIK is not available for FC1.  I suppose this is something the docs
people (in fedora-docs-list) are working on.  Meanwhile, you might as
well use the RHL9 docs.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                 aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist                Professional serial bug killer