Fedora 12 selecting Install or upgrade?

First you should determine if you are doing a new install or an upgrade. If you are upgrading an existing Fedora system to the latest version, the installation process will try to leave your data files and configuration files intact as much as possible. You also need to do the upgrade from the DVD because upgrades are not available from the Fedora live CD.

An upgrade installation takes longer than a new install. A new install will simply erase all data on the Linux partitions (or entire hard disk) that you choose. (You can optionally select which partitions to format.)

If you choose to upgrade, you can save yourself some time (and disk space) by removing software packages you don�t need. An upgrade will just skip packages that are not installed and not try to upgrade them. Here are a few other tips related to upgrades:

� Conflicting packages � If you upgrade a system on which you installed packages from sources outside of the Fedora project that conflict with Fedora packages, those features may no longer work. For example, if you replaced GNOME with Ximian GNOME or used a third-party KDE package set, you can�t upgrade those packages to Fedora 12 (It�s probably best to remove those packages before upgrading, and then apply them again later if you like.)

� Third-party packages � If you have installed packages from third-party repositories that are specific to your current kernel (such as drivers for NVidia video cards or wireless LAN cards) you will need to get new versions of those packages that match your upgraded kernel.

� Kernel requirements � To upgrade, you must have at least a Linux 2.0 kernel installed on the system you are upgrading.

� Configuration files � With an upgrade, your configuration files that are replaced are saved as filename.rpmsave (for example, the hosts file is saved as hosts.rpmsave). More often, however, your old configuration files will remain in place, while the system copies new configuration files to filename.rpmnew. The locations of those files, as well as other upgrade information, is written to /root/upgrade.log. The upgrade installs the new kernel, any changed software packages, and any packages that the installed packages depend on being there. Your data files and configuration information should remain intact.

� Digital certificates � If you are using digital certificates on your system, you must relocate them to the /etc/pki directory after the upgrade.

� Java � If you used the Java RPM from Sun Microsystems to provide Java support, conflicts with that package may cause it to be erased during an upgrade. If that occurs, you can install the Java RPM from jpackage.org or install the Java tarball from Sun Microsystems into your /opt directory. You can also consider removing that version of
Java from your system and instead using the open source Java IcedTea packages included with Fedora to provide Java support.


A feature that is available when you are upgrading to Fedora 12 is the preupgrade package. By installing preupgrade on a Fedora 11 system (yum install preupgrade), you can prepare your system to upgrade to Fedora 12 by launching a single application to:

� Determine which packages need to be downloaded to upgrade to Fedora 12.

� Download the packages needed to complete the upgrade (while Fedora 11 is still running)

� Download the boot images needed for the upgrade.

The advantage to using preupgrade is that you can continue using your system while you do most of the time-consuming work (such as downloading packages) that needs to be done to complete an upgrade. Also, before you get into running the installer, you will be able to see if there are any package dependencies you should deal with (before committing to the actual upgrade).

With the preupgrade package installed, you can start the GUI version of preupgrade by typing preupgrade from a Terminal window as root user. Files needed for the upgrade are copied to the /var/cache/yum/preupgrade* directories. Once preupgrade is complete, you can reboot to begin the upgrade.

Source of Information :  Wiley - Adobe Fedora Bible 2010 Edition Featuring Fedora Linux