Upgrading Fedora with Yum!
I had this server in the corner than ran my Request Tracker software for the company and my Wiki page for the group. It was a quiet box, not a lot of responsibility and it has just hummed along with no problems for 3 years now. Well, the other day I decided I wanted to try an upgrade of RT to check out some of the new features. As I logged onto the box, out of habit, I did a uname -a and noticed I was on Fedora Core 5. Yikes!
What proceeded was a frantic search for a good way to upgrade a -way- out of date linux distro… and it needed to be easy, I didn’t want to boot CD’s all over again.
Then I found IONCANNON’s guide to updating FC using Yum. In all honesty, it sounded too good to be true. Skeptical, I decided to try the FC5 to FC6 upgrade with Yum guide after a quick backup of the system. Not only was it easy, it took about 1 hour and I was running FC6. Still grossly out of date, I decided to continue the upgrade path to a supported distro release…. so over the past day I have gone from FC6 > FC7 > FC8 > FC9 through Yum.
For the most part, each upgrade was simple. There were a couple of farts at FC7 > FC8 which were resolved with a yum remove <package> and then a reinstall after the upgrade. And a pretty big flop in RT after the FC8 > FC9 upgrade where I had to run through all of the dependencies for RT again and use Yum & CPAN to install them over again.
Aside from that, I give serious props to this guy for keeping the series going through each FC release and helping me keep my box up to date.
http://www.ioncannon.net/linux/68/upgrading-from-fc6-to-fedora7-with-yum/
http://www.ioncannon.net/system-administration/133/upgrading-from-fedora-7-to-fedora-8-with-yum/
http://www.ioncannon.net/system-administration/138/upgrading-from-fedora-8-to-fedora-9-with-yum/
http://www.ioncannon.net/system-administration/142/upgrading-from-fedora-9-to-fedora-10-with-yum/
