On Mon, 8 Oct 2007, Gilbert Sebenste wrote:
On Mon, 8 Oct 2007, Dan Vietor wrote:
My recommendation is that Linux has now gotten to the point where
upgrades are just not feasible. There are too many packages, too many
hardware configurations and too many options to do upgrades. My horror
on going from Core 6 to 7 confirmed this. I now believe reinstall is
the only realistic option. I won't do an upgrade for other Fedora
systems.
Absolutely. I stopped doing this with Fedora 1. Just way too many gotchas.
I've been using linux for about 12 or 13 years now and the only systems
that I've had reliable version upgrades on were Debian Linux. For some
reason they really seem to get things right, including their package
dependancies. For all others I'll do a clean install.
I've worked with CentOS a bit and it really is RedHat for all practical
purposes. Very well done. I won't go near Fedora as it really behaves
more like a beta than a well tested release. Too many annoying issues.
Personally, I lean towards Slackware and FreeBSD but that's just me. I've
had far fewer issues with either of those systems.
When I install a Linux system, I do a manual partition with a 5GB "/var"
or larger for web servers, a 10GB "/" for the OS and the rest of the
disk in "/home". This means you can reload without blowing everything
away. I just reformat the "/" and "/var" partitions and then all your
data remains.
I prefer to blow it all away, backing things up from the start, on one
partition. Unless you have multiple drives, if the drive go, so does
everything else.
I create two 10GB primary partitions when I build a host. One will be the
root partition and the other will become the root partition for the next
upgrade. I keep home and any other data on separate partitions or
physical disks (depending on the need). This makes it so I can revert to
the old system in a pinch or at least have the old configurations
available for reference while setting up the OS after an upgrade. It also
makes backup and restoring the OS very simple and independent of data.
Mark Tucker
Meteorology Dept. Systems Administrator
Lyndon State College
http://apollo.lsc.vsc.edu
mark.tucker@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(802)-626-6328
