Biting the bullet?

[Steven Rosenberg]

On Sun, May 10, 2015 at 9:08 PM, Rolf Turner <r.turner at auckland.ac.nz>
wrote:

> I have finally reached a stage where I may have to bite the bullet, grasp
> the nettle, screw my courage to the sticking place .... and upgrade my
> Fedora version.
>
> I am currently running Fedora 17.  Which is of course antediluvian. But
> everything I have seen on this list with respect to upgrading terrifies
> me.  Disasters seem to lurk everywhere and I haven't the skills to cope
> with disasters.  Nor do I have access to any support in respect of Fedora.
>


I've done double and triple upgrades before. Sometimes it works, other
times not so much. But it always takes a long time.

I think people's aversion to reinstalling comes from accepted practices for
Windows, when reinstalling meant you'd lose all of your pirated software
that some guy somewhere installed for you years ago. In Windows it's always
better to start fresh. And while Linux doesn't usually accumulate the same
cruft, it can't hurt to have a fresh installation every once in awhile.

Myself? I'm a lazy reinstaller. I've been running Fedora on my current
laptop since version 18 and have been upgrading via Fedup every release
until the present (F21). So my current system didn't start out all that
much newer than yours.

That said, I've been lucky. If anything had gone hinky in the many Fedup
upgrades I've been through, I always make sure to have a full backup of my
user files. And setting up your environment with the software and settings
you want isn't as terrible as it sounds.

For instance, I have a very touchy Citrix situation. Citrix isn't packaged
by almost any distros, and certainly not by Fedora. The instructions for
getting it running in Ubuntu are longer than they should be. I decided to
bite that bullet, as you say, and upgrade to a new Citrix version. I got
the RPM from Citrix, uninstalled the old and installed the new. And it all
works as well as it did before.

If you don't have a good backup, you're playing with fire anyway, and
eventually there is going to be pain.

So my first advice is to solidify your backup strategy in such a way that
includes more than one backup.

Then crawl through your current system and make notes about what you want
to re-create in your new one. Make sure you have backups of the
configuration files you need. Things like my Unison configuration are in my
/home directory, but it never hurts to have a second copy. I have a few
things in /etc/default/grub that I need. So I make a backup of that.

Then, with a current system at Fedora 17, I would NOT do a Fedup upgrade. I
would reinstall. It's faster and more foolproof.

If you're really worried, you should get another hard drive and image the
entire system with CloneZilla. That way if things don't go the way you
want, you have your original system to work from.


That said, Fedup is pretty good, but unless you have a ton of bandwidth and
a ton of spare time, I'd back up and reinstall.
--
Steven Rosenberg
http://stevenrosenberg.net/blog
http://blogs.dailynews.com/click
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