Installing a new distro

[Steve Hayes]

Last year I installed Fedora 14.

Now I have got a disc with Fedora 16 on it.

If I install it will it wipe all my data, or will it just upgrade the Os?


--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

[Dan Espen]

Steve Hayes <haye...@telkomsa.net> writes:

> Last year I installed Fedora 14.
>
> Now I have got a disc with Fedora 16 on it.
>
> If I install it will it wipe all my data, or will it just upgrade the Os?

Do you have /home on a separate partition?
(You should.)

During install, do not format /home and your data will be safe.
Write down your current UID/GID so you can use the same
values when you define your userid.

Run a backup before install.


--
Dan Espen

[Robert Heller]

At Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:50:03 +0200 Steve Hayes <haye...@telkomsa.net> wrote:

>
> Last year I installed Fedora 14.
>
> Now I have got a disc with Fedora 16 on it.
>
> If I install it will it wipe all my data, or will it just upgrade the Os?

A fresh install (recomended) will wipe your disk. *IF* you put /home on
its own partition, you can have the installer leave that partition/file
system alone. Otherwise you should back everything up, or at least
/home, /etc, /usr/local and any other directories with files you want to
keep (/var/www, etc.), do the fresh install and then do a selective
restore of the backup.

You *can* attempt an upgrade, but this is not really recomended or
supported as it will leave old O/S crud behind, which can cause all
sorts of weird problems.

One of the major downsides to using Fedora and why it is not recomended
for any sort of production work.

>
>

--
Robert Heller -- 978-544-6933 / hel...@deepsoft.com
Deepwoods Software -- http://www.deepsoft.com/
() ascii ribbon campaign -- against html e-mail
/\ www.asciiribbon.org -- against proprietary attachments

[Dan Espen]

Robert Heller <hel...@deepsoft.com> writes:

> At Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:50:03 +0200 Steve Hayes <haye...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
>
>>
>> Last year I installed Fedora 14.
>>
>> Now I have got a disc with Fedora 16 on it.
>>
>> If I install it will it wipe all my data, or will it just upgrade the Os?
>
> A fresh install (recomended) will wipe your disk. *IF* you put /home on
> its own partition, you can have the installer leave that partition/file
> system alone. Otherwise you should back everything up, or at least
> /home, /etc, /usr/local and any other directories with files you want to
> keep (/var/www, etc.), do the fresh install and then do a selective
> restore of the backup.
>
> You *can* attempt an upgrade, but this is not really recomended or
> supported as it will leave old O/S crud behind, which can cause all
> sorts of weird problems.

I got away with a whole series of Fedora updates.
But FC 16 seemed to re-work too many things so I had to do a
fresh install.

> One of the major downsides to using Fedora and why it is not recomended
> for any sort of production work.

Fine for desktop use in my opinion, but I agree.
Businesses should pay for support.

--
Dan Espen

[Steve Hayes]

On Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:57:15 -0600, Robert Heller <hel...@deepsoft.com> wrote:

>At Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:50:03 +0200 Steve Hayes <haye...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
>
>>
>> Last year I installed Fedora 14.
>>
>> Now I have got a disc with Fedora 16 on it.
>>
>> If I install it will it wipe all my data, or will it just upgrade the Os?
>
>A fresh install (recomended) will wipe your disk. *IF* you put /home on
>its own partition, you can have the installer leave that partition/file
>system alone. Otherwise you should back everything up, or at least
>/home, /etc, /usr/local and any other directories with files you want to
>keep (/var/www, etc.), do the fresh install and then do a selective
>restore of the backup.

How do I put /home in its own partition?

>
>You *can* attempt an upgrade, but this is not really recomended or
>supported as it will leave old O/S crud behind, which can cause all
>sorts of weird problems.
>
>One of the major downsides to using Fedora and why it is not recomended
>for any sort of production work.

Until now I've only used it for playing with stuff, and not for any serious
work. If I do things like word processing I've stored the documents in
partitions accessible to Windows, so I can work with them from there.

But I wonder if anyone does use it for any serious work, and if so how they
overcome this difficulty.

[Dan Espen]

Steve Hayes <haye...@telkomsa.net> writes:

> On Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:57:15 -0600, Robert Heller <hel...@deepsoft.com> wrote:
>
>>At Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:50:03 +0200 Steve Hayes <haye...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
>>> Last year I installed Fedora 14.
>>>
>>> Now I have got a disc with Fedora 16 on it.
>>>
>>> If I install it will it wipe all my data, or will it just upgrade the Os?
>>
>>A fresh install (recomended) will wipe your disk. *IF* you put /home on
>>its own partition, you can have the installer leave that partition/file
>>system alone. Otherwise you should back everything up, or at least
>>/home, /etc, /usr/local and any other directories with files you want to
>>keep (/var/www, etc.), do the fresh install and then do a selective
>>restore of the backup.
>
> How do I put /home in its own partition?

Create a partition, mount it as /home.
You should find the tools needed System Tools/Disk Management.
Of course, you need the space too.

>>You *can* attempt an upgrade, but this is not really recomended or
>>supported as it will leave old O/S crud behind, which can cause all
>>sorts of weird problems.
>>
>>One of the major downsides to using Fedora and why it is not recomended
>>for any sort of production work.
>
> Until now I've only used it for playing with stuff, and not for any serious
> work. If I do things like word processing I've stored the documents in
> partitions accessible to Windows, so I can work with them from there.

Ever hear of LibreOffice?

> But I wonder if anyone does use it for any serious work, and if so how they
> overcome this difficulty.

What difficulty?

Sounds like you are just starting out and don't really have much
data to save. Maybe you just need to zip up your home directory and
store it where you keep your windows stuff. Then unzip it when
the install is done.


--
Dan Espen

[Robert Heller]

At Wed, 08 Feb 2012 04:46:29 +0200 Steve Hayes <haye...@telkomsa.net> wrote:

>
> On Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:57:15 -0600, Robert Heller <hel...@deepsoft.com> wrote:
>
> >At Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:50:03 +0200 Steve Hayes <haye...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
> >
> >>
> >> Last year I installed Fedora 14.
> >>
> >> Now I have got a disc with Fedora 16 on it.
> >>
> >> If I install it will it wipe all my data, or will it just upgrade the Os?
> >
> >A fresh install (recomended) will wipe your disk. *IF* you put /home on
> >its own partition, you can have the installer leave that partition/file
> >system alone. Otherwise you should back everything up, or at least
> >/home, /etc, /usr/local and any other directories with files you want to
> >keep (/var/www, etc.), do the fresh install and then do a selective
> >restore of the backup.
>
> How do I put /home in its own partition?

By selecting custom file system layout during the install. If you
didn't do it when you installed Fedora 14, it is probably too late --
at this point it would be easier to just make a backup of your current
/home directory, along with selected files from /etc (partitularly
/etc/passwd, /etc/group, and /etc/shadow). Then do a fresh install and
this time select the custom partitioning option and create a separate
partition for /home, and then restore the backup of /home and use the
backups of the /etc files to configure the new system to match (you
want to be mindful of the UIDs and GIDs of the files under the /home
directory).

>
> >
> >You *can* attempt an upgrade, but this is not really recomended or
> >supported as it will leave old O/S crud behind, which can cause all
> >sorts of weird problems.
> >
> >One of the major downsides to using Fedora and why it is not recomended
> >for any sort of production work.
>
> Until now I've only used it for playing with stuff, and not for any serious
> work. If I do things like word processing I've stored the documents in
> partitions accessible to Windows, so I can work with them from there.
>
> But I wonder if anyone does use it for any serious work, and if so how they
> overcome this difficulty.

People don't use Fedora for 'serious work'. Fedora is a beta test bed
for Redhat Enterprise Linux (aka RHEL), which is a paid subscription
distro (large companies pay Redhat for this system and get paid for
support for corporate servers and workstations). There is a GPL
distro, CentOS which is binary compatible with RHEL -- it is RHEL with
Redhat's IP removed/replaced. There is an academic version called
Scientic Linux which is another distro that is based on RHEL. RHEL /
CentOS / and Scientic Linux had a supported lifetime of 7 years, but
now have a supported lifetime of 10 years (Redhat recently extended the
lifetime of RHEL). Over that period the main version numbers of the
packages stay the same, with backports of security patches and
important bug fixes. Also kernel driver backports for some hardware
(but not all).

Professional Linux admins (and users) know about creating separate
partitions for non-OS directories, like /home and/or understand about
how to migrate a system to a new major O/S version, usually by using a
new physical or virtual machine with a fresh install and then migrating
files. I recently did this with a VPS running CentOS 4 (which is EOL
this month) to a fresh VPS running CentOS 5. Not difficult if you know
what you are doing.

[Dan C]

On Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:50:03 +0200, Steve Hayes wrote:

> Last year I installed Fedora 14.
>
> Now I have got a disc with Fedora 16 on it.
>
> If I install it will it wipe all my data, or will it just upgrade the
> Os?

The fact that you need to ask such questions indicates that you should
just stick with Windoze.


--
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me".
"Bother!" said Pooh, as Christopher Robin pleaded to be spanked again.
Usenet Improvement Project: http://twovoyagers.com/improve-usenet.org/
Thanks, Obama: http://brandybuck.site40.net/pics/politica/thanks.jpg

[Richard Kettlewell]

Robert Heller <hel...@deepsoft.com> writes:
> Professional Linux admins (and users) know about creating separate
> partitions for non-OS directories, like /home and/or understand about
> how to migrate a system to a new major O/S version, usually by using a
> new physical or virtual machine with a fresh install and then migrating
> files.

I'm having trouble understanding why anyone would tolerate destructive
upgrades in 2012.

A new OS version might work a bit differently, have new bugs, etc, and
that's an unavoidable reason to be cautious. But “keep /home across
upgrades even if it’s on /” is solved problem.

--
http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

[J G Miller]

On Tuesday, February 7th, 2012, at 22:36:52h -0600, Robert Heller wrote:

> People don't use Fedora for 'serious work'.

Are you suggesting that people who use Fedora in order to develop
the next version of Fedora are not doing "serious work"?

I would suggest that Red Hat regards people using Fedora
to develop Fedora as a core part of its business.

[Dan Espen]

Robert Heller <hel...@deepsoft.com> writes:

> People don't use Fedora for 'serious work'. Fedora is a beta test bed
> for Redhat Enterprise Linux (aka RHEL), which is a paid subscription
> distro (large companies pay Redhat for this system and get paid for
> support for corporate servers and workstations).

Strange phrase 'serious work'.
I do everything including work from a Fedora box and
have been doing so from years.

I'm serious when I do it too.

Despite the idea that Fedora is a test bed,
I find that all the stuff I'm using is stable when
I get it.

--
Dan Espen

[Robert Heller]

*Fedora* is test bed system. It is not really intended for normal use
cases. Yes, I understand that ubuntu, for example can cleanly upgrade
across major versions non-destructively. RHEL/CentOS upgrade across
minor versions transparently. Because of the long lifetime (7-10
years) of RHEL/CentOS is becomes too extreme a jump to upgrade across
major versions of RHEL/CentOS (and I expect that SUSE is not any
different). Production / exterprise systems are a somewhat different
use case than home / personal systems, with very different management
methodologies.

The OP probably should NOT be using Fedora and would likely be better
off with ubuntu. He would likely find the upgrade process less difficult
and painfull. Fedora is simplely not intended to be upgraded -- this is
the nature of a beta test system.

[Robert Heller]

I meant serious work outside of beta testing. The OP did not appear
like he was looking at being a beta tester but wanted to do more
ordinary things with his computer.

[Robert Heller]

I was responding to the OP, who seemed (understandably) uphappy about
the sort of upgrade issues that exist when using Fedora in *his*
context. The 'serious work' phrase was his usage and I put it in quote
marks to indicate that. Yes, I know that lots of people use Fedora for
serious work all the time. But these people generally understand how
Fedora works and the upgrade issues that exist with Fedora (and know
about backups and/or putting /home on a separate file system, etc.).

Please don't quote me out of context!

[Richard Kettlewell]

Robert Heller <hel...@deepsoft.com> writes:

> Richard Kettlewell <r...@greenend.org.uk> wrote:

>> I'm having trouble understanding why anyone would tolerate
>> destructive upgrades in 2012.
>>
>> A new OS version might work a bit differently, have new bugs, etc,
>> and that's an unavoidable reason to be cautious. But “keep /home
>> across upgrades even if it’s on /” is solved problem.
>
> *Fedora* is test bed system. It is not really intended for normal use
> cases.

So what? That doesn’t imply upgrades have to be destructive.

Also, its website tells me that “Fedora is a fast, stable, and powerful
operating system for everyday use”, so perhaps you should tell them it’s
not for normal use.

--
http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

[Aragorn]

On Wednesday 08 February 2012 15:27, Richard Kettlewell conveyed the
following to comp.os.linux.misc...

Microsoft claims a similar thing about Windows. You believe them too?
:p

--
= Aragorn =
(registered GNU/Linux user #223157)

[Steve Hayes]

On Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:15:55 -0600, Robert Heller <hel...@deepsoft.com> wrote:

>I was responding to the OP, who seemed (understandably) uphappy about
>the sort of upgrade issues that exist when using Fedora in *his*
>context. The 'serious work' phrase was his usage and I put it in quote
>marks to indicate that. Yes, I know that lots of people use Fedora for
>serious work all the time. But these people generally understand how
>Fedora works and the upgrade issues that exist with Fedora (and know
>about backups and/or putting /home on a separate file system, etc.).

Thanks to you and everyone else who commented.

It has given me the information I need in order to decide whether to upgrade
or not.

[Dan Espen]

Dan C <youmust...@lan.invalid> writes:

> On Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:50:03 +0200, Steve Hayes wrote:
>
>> Last year I installed Fedora 14.
>>
>> Now I have got a disc with Fedora 16 on it.
>>
>> If I install it will it wipe all my data, or will it just upgrade the
>> Os?
>
> The fact that you need to ask such questions indicates that you should
> just stick with Windoze.

Dan C, the famous internet troll.

Sure it's a beginner type question. I'm sure _you_ were never
a beginner.

--
Dan Espen

[Dan Espen]

Robert Heller <hel...@deepsoft.com> writes:

> At Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:56:07 -0500 Dan Espen <des...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>>
>> Robert Heller <hel...@deepsoft.com> writes:
>>
>> > People don't use Fedora for 'serious work'. Fedora is a beta test bed
>> > for Redhat Enterprise Linux (aka RHEL), which is a paid subscription
>> > distro (large companies pay Redhat for this system and get paid for
>> > support for corporate servers and workstations).
>>
>> Strange phrase 'serious work'.
>> I do everything including work from a Fedora box and
>> have been doing so from years.
>>
>> I'm serious when I do it too.
>>
>> Despite the idea that Fedora is a test bed,
>> I find that all the stuff I'm using is stable when
>> I get it.
>
> I was responding to the OP, who seemed (understandably) uphappy about
> the sort of upgrade issues that exist when using Fedora in *his*
> context. The 'serious work' phrase was his usage and I put it in quote
> marks to indicate that. Yes, I know that lots of people use Fedora for
> serious work all the time. But these people generally understand how
> Fedora works and the upgrade issues that exist with Fedora (and know
> about backups and/or putting /home on a separate file system, etc.).
>
> Please don't quote me out of context!

As I said, "strange phrase". Just trying to figure out what
you meant.

As far as difficulties upgrading Fedora, as a rule, I haven't
found any. In fact I think I started with FC 4 and just changed
my repositories to 5 and ran an update. I did that all the way up
to 15 using the "preupgrade" script.

I forget exactly what happened with FC 16 but FC 16 was the first
time I ended up doing a fresh install in many years.

I expect to be able to go back to just doing upgrades in the
future.

In short, upgrading Fedora is as easy as it gets.

--
Dan Espen

[Dan Espen]

Robert Heller <hel...@deepsoft.com> writes:

> At Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:08:44 +0000 Richard Kettlewell <r...@greenend.org.uk> wrote:
>
>>
>> Robert Heller <hel...@deepsoft.com> writes:
>> > Professional Linux admins (and users) know about creating separate
>> > partitions for non-OS directories, like /home and/or understand about
>> > how to migrate a system to a new major O/S version, usually by using a
>> > new physical or virtual machine with a fresh install and then migrating
>> > files.
>>
>> I'm having trouble understanding why anyone would tolerate destructive
>> upgrades in 2012.
>>
>> A new OS version might work a bit differently, have new bugs, etc, and

>> that's an unavoidable reason to be cautious. But “keep /home across
>> upgrades even if it’s on /†is solved problem.

>
> *Fedora* is test bed system. It is not really intended for normal use
> cases. Yes, I understand that ubuntu, for example can cleanly upgrade
> across major versions non-destructively. RHEL/CentOS upgrade across
> minor versions transparently. Because of the long lifetime (7-10
> years) of RHEL/CentOS is becomes too extreme a jump to upgrade across
> major versions of RHEL/CentOS (and I expect that SUSE is not any
> different). Production / exterprise systems are a somewhat different
> use case than home / personal systems, with very different management
> methodologies.
>
> The OP probably should NOT be using Fedora and would likely be better
> off with ubuntu. He would likely find the upgrade process less difficult
> and painfull.
> Fedora is simplely not intended to be upgraded -- this is
> the nature of a beta test system.

This last part is simply wrong.

Fedora has been packaging the pre-upgrade script for a long time now.
It's worked flawlessly for me for a long time with the exception of
FC 16. I might have been the cause of the FC 16 problems since I
started doing upgrades before the pre-upgrade script was around.

--
Dan Espen

[Chick Tower]

On 2012-02-07, Steve Hayes <haye...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
> Last year I installed Fedora 14.
>
> Now I have got a disc with Fedora 16 on it.
>
> If I install it will it wipe all my data, or will it just upgrade the Os?

If your technical knowledge may be judged from the asking of such a
question, I would say you would be capable of not only wiping out all of
your data, but of messing up the Windows installation you mention in a
later post. That's harsh, but it's also true, and meant to encourage
you to learn more before you take the plunge.

Pay attention to the other posts in repy to yours, especially the ones
about backing or zipping up your data. Find some installation
instructions for Fedora; you might find some on RedHat's website, or at

http://www.howtoforge.com

If you just want to play around with Linux, you could get some live CDs
and boot them when you want to experiment. They won't change anything
on your hard disk, unless you know what you're doing.
--
Chick Tower

For e-mail: colm DOT sent DOT towerboy AT xoxy DOT net

[Dan C]

On Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:11:48 -0500, Dan Espen wrote:

> Dan C <youmust...@lan.invalid> writes:
>
>> On Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:50:03 +0200, Steve Hayes wrote:
>>
>>> Last year I installed Fedora 14.
>>>
>>> Now I have got a disc with Fedora 16 on it.
>>>
>>> If I install it will it wipe all my data, or will it just upgrade the
>>> Os?
>>
>> The fact that you need to ask such questions indicates that you should
>> just stick with Windoze.
>
> Dan C, the famous internet troll.

Really? What's "troll" about my post above?

That's right. Nothing.

> Sure it's a beginner type question. I'm sure _you_ were never a
> beginner.

That is correct.

--
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me".

"Bother!" said Pooh, as he scrambled his partition table.

[unruh]

On 2012-02-09, Dan C <youmust...@lan.invalid> wrote:
> On Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:11:48 -0500, Dan Espen wrote:
>
>> Dan C <youmust...@lan.invalid> writes:
>>
>>> On Tue, 07 Feb 2012 17:50:03 +0200, Steve Hayes wrote:
>>>
>>>> Last year I installed Fedora 14.
>>>>
>>>> Now I have got a disc with Fedora 16 on it.
>>>>
>>>> If I install it will it wipe all my data, or will it just upgrade the
>>>> Os?

It depends on what you ask it to do. If you ask it to upgrade, it will
replace the current programs with newer ones, possibly wiping out old
configuration files, or saving them, or using the old config files with
the updated programs. It may also not put in a new program because the
name has changed from the old one ( eg gimp-> gimp2 say, and since gimp2
is a different word from gimp, it will not know that gimp should be
updated. Or it will update but leave pieces of gimp lying aroud to cause
problems.)

If you ask it to reinstall, it will wipe out the parttions containing
/etc and /usr. If you only have one partition it will wipe out
everything on that partition including your data. If you have many
partitions and your data is on a separate partition to your programs,
your data should be left alone.
You will however have to reconfigure all the programs.

It is ALWAYS a good idea to have a backup. Even if you choose upgrade,
something could happen which would wipe out your data. Probably not, but
probably is not certainly.

>>>
>>> The fact that you need to ask such questions indicates that you should
>>> just stick with Windoze.
>>
>> Dan C, the famous internet troll.
>
> Really? What's "troll" about my post above?
>
> That's right. Nothing.

I agree troll is the wrong word. Rude, inconsiderate, combatitive,
obnoxious for some obscure reason all come to mind, but troll does not.

[Steve Hayes]

On 8 Feb 2012 23:03:06 +0100, Chick Tower <c.t...@deadspam.com> wrote:

>On 2012-02-07, Steve Hayes <haye...@telkomsa.net> wrote:
>> Last year I installed Fedora 14.
>>
>> Now I have got a disc with Fedora 16 on it.
>>
>> If I install it will it wipe all my data, or will it just upgrade the Os?
>
>If your technical knowledge may be judged from the asking of such a
>question, I would say you would be capable of not only wiping out all of
>your data, but of messing up the Windows installation you mention in a
>later post. That's harsh, but it's also true, and meant to encourage
>you to learn more before you take the plunge.

Well, my fears turned out to be groundless.

The installation disc I had had an option to upgrade rather than do a fressh
install, so I chose that and it worked perfectly.

The only problem was that it said my hardware wasn't adequate to give me the
full Gnome 3 experience.

Linux 16 loads, my old installed programs and data are all there (except for
the ones that have been updated - LibreOffice substituted for Open Office
etc,) my password works, Windows loads.

>Pay attention to the other posts in repy to yours, especially the ones
>about backing or zipping up your data.

Oh, I did. And I'm grateful for all the good advice, though not so much for
some of the crappy advice.

> Find some installation
>instructions for Fedora; you might find some on RedHat's website, or at
>
> http://www.howtoforge.com

Turns out they weren't needed.

>If you just want to play around with Linux, you could get some live CDs
>and boot them when you want to experiment. They won't change anything
>on your hard disk, unless you know what you're doing.

Aye, I've done that -- but it's a bit like doing a fresh install every time
you boot.