On Sun, May 10, 2015 at 9:08 PM, Rolf Turner <r.turner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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.
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