Art Alexion on 12 Aug 2004 21:20:03 -0000


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Re: [PLUG] update strategies/partition issue 

Paul wrote:

Art Alexion wrote:

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.)

I have Mandrake 9.1, Slackware 9.1, Suse 9 (a live eval CD; don't know whether it will install to the HD), but want to try the hardware optimized version of Gentoo (need to download).

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.?

First, back-up everything or grab a new harddrive. If you want to upgrade RedHat 7.3 you might want to stick with the RedHat X.X series. How about trying RedHat 9.0?


Well I have the CDs for 8.0 but not 9.0.


I don't know if Fedora would work well over RedHat 7.1.


I have 7.3, but I guess the same issues remain. BTW, is FC1 more stable than FC2, or should I go with 2 if I am going in that direction?


Hey, how about Whitebox or CentOS?

This is a computer on a 2.5 computer network (the 0.5 is an old Win95 486-vesa bus; running the old software like a charm; I use it for some old vertical apps that aren't worth upgrading to current versions) so I wonder if Whitebox or CentOS aren' t overkill?


In any case, switching to something non-RedHat would require a fresh install.


Tom Diehl wrote:

Although I would not recommend upgrading to RHL 7.3 or 9 since neither is
supported by Red Hat, the Fedora Legacy project (fedoralegacy.org) is still
providing updates for both RHL 7.3 and 9. They will most likely continue
to do so as long as there is enough interest by volunteers to create the
errata releases. Due to lack of interest they have discontinued support
for anything older than 7.3 and RHL 8.0.



George Gallen wrote:

Generally, when RH sees it has a former self on install it
asks if you want to upgrade or install (fresh). If you pick
upgrade, it will just upgrade the kernel and any drivers I
believe you are using.

I upgraded 7.3 to 8.0 without a problem
then upgraded from 8.0 to FC1, but a USB network adapter didn't work.
But then I did a fresh install of FC1 and it worked fine, so something
didn't take on the second upgrade.

OK.

First, I am pleasantly surprised that I can upgrade RH->RH without loosing my data.

I don't think the swap partition is big enough. Not sure. But I can burn /home to a CD-RW or 2.

I yanked a 40 GB Maxtor from a computer I was going to put in my wife's classroom. She just needs a word processor, anyway. So I guess I can try a new distro on that. Any opinions on the hardware optimized version of Gentoo? Mandrake? Slackware?

Meantime, I may as well try upgrading RH 7.3 -> 8.0 or whatever else would be an easy upgrade just to see. Can I skip versions if I get a hold of a newer RH?

I'd do:

1. Make a full backup.


I suppose there isn't that much reason to back up more than /home?


Dan Widyono wrote:

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 a CPA neighbor who tells me that none of the user targeted accounting packages -- Quicken, Quickbooks, Peachtree or Money have "true to accounting practices budgeting" dealing with lay concepts like income and expense rather than debits and credits. I suppose gnucash is aimed at the same user as the win-mac products, above, so it uses the lay concepts both for general understanding and for compatibility in terms of import-export.

I am anxious to get it working because I just switched banks, and I want to start the new account in gnucash rather than having to move it from Quickbooks.

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...

probably easier to back up to a cd-rw...

--

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