Fedora 8 is going to be released in 4 days. That means its time to upgrade your operating system. Why? Because you get the latest and the greatest cutting edge technology with Fedora 8. What if you choose not to upgrade? That is fine as long as you are running Fedora 7. Why? Because Fedora releases are supported only for one future release. That means if you are running Fedora core 6 you will not receive updates for them after December of 2007. Of course those running Fedora core 5 or earlier release would already know about it. But for those who are planning to jump into using Fedora keep in mind that you need to be current with your Fedora release in order to get patches, updates and security fixes.

Before you start anything the first thing you would have to do is backup your hard disk. The second most important thing you would have to do is to back up your hard disk. Never upgrade without having at least one backup. For backing up you can use several different software like Amanda or Mondo Rescue. I haven't personally used these applications but I have heard that these are good. My personal favorite is rsync which I guess is developed by the samba developers. rsync is simple, easy and a very versatile incremental backup utility. I have a script which backup the entire /home directory to the backup disk. My script looks similar to this
#!/bin/sh
rsync -avz $HOME/ aravind@xxx.xxx.xxx:$HOME/Backup/

I personally backup only my /home but you may choose to backup your entire hard drive.

For those who are planning to try Linux for the first time it is a good idea to have \home folder in a separate partition and the rest of the filesystem on a different partition. If you are fancy you can also have \etc and \usr as separate partitions. For more information about Linux filesystem hierarchy listen to Linux Reality Podcast episode 11.

After the backups are done make a note of all the software that are installed in your current installation. If you would like to go to the other extreme and find out all the installed rpms you can type the following rpm -qa > installed-packages.txt. The text file installed-packages.txt will have all the installed binaries using the Red Hat Package Management (rpm) command. You can make sure that all of these are installed in your installation yum. Also make a note of everything that you do while you are performing the upgrade process.

Upgrading to Fedora 8 has several options

1. Live yum upgrade
2. Anaconda upgrade
3. Fresh install
4. Preupgrade (hopefully be available for Fedora 9)

Before we move on let us look at our options

Live yum upgrade

This is one of the most simplest form of upgrades possible. All you need is to ensure that the yum is configured to have the correct repository. Then on your live system (running a Fedora release) open a terminal and run yum upgrade. This is called live because when you are upgrading, the kernel (or the operating system along with its applications) is running while the upgrade takes place. I would have to point out that this is not a recommended option for upgrading your Fedora release. A Live Upgrade Special Interest Group in the Fedora community is trying to make this painless, but still this is not a recommended upgrade process. I guess a Debian live upgrade works flawlessly.

Anaconda Upgrade

Anaconda is the famous Fedora installer used in Fedora, Red Hat and other distros. Upgrading involves booting using the installation CD/DVD and the Anaconda installer will guide you through the installation process. Anaconda will search for an existing installation and would let you choose to upgrade to the new installation. The installer will automatically search for the appropriate binaries to be upgraded. No partitions will be formatted or erased and no user data will be erased. This type of upgrade process has less risk in terms of data loss since no partition is formatted.

Fresh Install

Fresh installation is the recommended type of upgrade process. This involves formatting the entire/part-of Linux filesystem. Basically everything which is done during a fresh install is done here except that the partition which has /home is left alone. Once the installation is complete, install the software that were installed in the previous installation. This process is painfully slow and cumbersome because you would be installing a lot of software but currently this is the most reliable upgrade process available for Fedora distributions. Since the /home directory is intact all the user setting and user data will also be intact. You would be good to go as soon as the appropriate software binaries are installed.

References

• Open-Source Backups Using Amanda
• Mondo Rescue
• Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard