Re: [PLUG] update strategies/partition issue

[Dan Widyono <dan@widyono.net>]

> I have been using RH 7.3.  It' s been stable and fine but is starting to 
> show its age vis-a-vie stuff I' d like to try but can't without a newer 
> distro.  (Newest frustration is installing gnucash; can't install newest 
> and distro version fails dependencies because the dependencies are newer 
> than it expects.)

FWIW, GnuCash was a royal pain to install on 7.3 but it was very easy on
9.0.  My next adventure is to install FermiLinux SL3.0.2 (RHEL3 based distro)
and see if GnuCash plays nicely with it.

GC doesn't have budgeting, so currently I use double line entry and manually
set the Transaction Type to BUDGET instead of Deposit/ATM/POS/etc.  Oh well.
Based on forum discussion, it sounds like adding
"true-to-accounting-practices" budgeting to GC will take a lot of work which
nobody seems to be willing to do at the moment.

> I have never updated the same machine with a new distro (only fresh 
> installs).  I only have 3 partitions: /, /boot and /swap.  Is there 
> anyway to update without loosing home directories, /opt stuff, etc.?

How large are they?  Turn off swap, copy /home and /opt to /swap (mount it as
something real, mkfs first, of course), and upgrade without swap at first.
Copy everything back, mkswap that partition, and add it back to /etc/fstab as
swap.  That would be the hard way.  The "easy" way is to add another drive
temporarily, or sync files to another system.  But you might not have those
resources available...

Regards,
Dan W.

P.S.  I believe it's vis-a-vis, and the last s is silent in French.  Crazy
language, eh wot? :)

-- 
-- Daniel Widyono             --
-- www.widyono.net            --
-- www.cis.upenn.edu/~widyono --
-- 
___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug