Upgrading from Redhat 8.0

[jerbear]

Hello all.

My system at work is running Redhat 8.0 - a preinstalled workstation from Dell. It serves a software package that we use on a regular basis, so the machine cannot be down for more than a day or so. That said, I have some issues with the system periodically (xwindows crashes and/or restarts on random occasions - usually right before I try to save something I've spent a few hours working on :mad: ) along with dependency errors due to the software being several years old. As such I am considering attempting to upgrade the system.

What would be the least painful path to upgrade? Will the latest Fedora update the system from Redhat 8, or should I go through intermediate steps (e.g. RH9.0 -> Fedora 1 -> etc...)? Unfortunately the system is not set up on multiple partitions. If it was I could simply reformat the partitions other than /opt and /home, but as this is a default install from dell, I have a single nice big / partition and a small /boot partion.

As an additional consideration, the software package we're using states that it is supported for RedHat Enterprise Linux v2.1 and v3.0. Would it be better to purchase the Enterprise edition, or is it pretty close to Fedora 3?

Also, as to the difficulty in upgrading, I'm not particularly proficient in linux. I know enough to find my way around and get things working well enough most of the time, but I'd be much more comfortable with not attempting an upgrade route that relies on my abilities to a significant degree!

Thanks for the help,
JB

[jerbear]

As an additional note, the company supporting the software just got back to me and told me they highly recommend purchasing RHE3.0 instead of going the Fedora route. Has anyone attempted to upgrade from RH8 (or RH9 for that matter) to RHE3?

Thanks,
JB

[Icarus]

I'd think the upgrade would be fairly painless.
I also second thier suggestion to go RHEL over Fedora for a business, Fedora is more of a testing ground for what goes into RHEL.

Plus Fedora 3 won't be out for a while and I would never recommend someone to use a beta product for production! :eek:

[Choozo]

In my experience, upgrading between major versions have never been a painless/flawless route - even between minor versions.
Easiest way has always been to do a clean install - reformatting everything except /home.

In your case it would mean to back up user data to some other medium, and then take advantage of creating a sensible partitioning scheme this time :) ... creating at least a separate '/boot' and '/home' along with the usual '/' and 'swap'.

Cheers :)

[jerbear]

It looks like we found a reasonable solution after all:
We have a laptop here that runs the software remotely on a regular basis. I think what we're going to do is buy 2 copies of RHE3 and put one on the laptop and move all the neccessary files and software to it temporarily. That gives me enough time to back up my drive and run a clean install without worrying about downtime.

One final question though. We are in an education institution, so we can take advantage of the academic pricing. However, the only server-type applications either of the computers run is ssh-server, samba-server, and nfs-server. Red Hat's site says that the desktop version has samba and nfs, though it doesn't mention whether these are the server or client versions. Presumably if the client is available the server would be as well. Do you know of any reason to avoid the desktop version in my case?

Thanks,
JB

[dysharmonic]

I'd go the clean install route too, and I think those apps you named above should be available in both the server and client packages on the CDs.

Unless RedHat had decided to strip those server progs off the desktop version. You could always download them from redhat.com.