FC5 => F8 upgrade : advice?

[Nifty Fedora Mitch]

On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 07:25:55PM +0000, Beartooth wrote:
> 
> 	I've come into possession of an otherwise nice machine (so I'm 
> told; I don't speak hardware) that still has Fedora Core 5 installed. I 
> want to upgrade it to F8 now, and F10 once that's released.
> 
> 	Is there a best way to go about it, short of a fresh install of 
> F8? It has a lot of data, as well as a lot of configuration, that I'd 
> hate to lose.
> 
> 	Any gotchas to watch out for?
> 
> 	If, say, I upgrade first to F7 (because I know where my DVD for 
> that is), and then to F8 -- do I want to update F7 as best I can in 
> between? Or just go straight to F8?
> 

Since this machine is new to you and old to someone else
the obvious question is what needs to be preserved?

If you wish to preserve stuff then do CD/DVD upgrades one at
a time.  In general a 5 to 6 upgrade works because 6 was tested
in exactly this update case.  Same for 6 to 7, 7 to 8 etc....

If this is now your machine and there is no need to preserve anyting
it is often best to just do a fresh install.   The advantage of a fresh
install is that you do not have to work through a bazillion *rpmnew and 
other historic config files.  And, If I recall the default partition sizes way back in
Fedora 2,3,4 times were too small for modern Fedora...  A clean install
will get you partition sizes (including swap) that make sense today.

With updates, one important command to know is "yum list extras".

-- 
	T o m  M i t c h e l l 
	Found me a new hat, now what?