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yet another day in fedora land...



Jarod Wilson wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-12-14 at 13:39 -0500, Nathan Meyers wrote:
>   
>> Stephen Adler wrote:
>>     
>>> Well, I was about to get divorced from Feroda and perhaps start an 
>>> affair with ubuntu... Long story short, my desktop setup just seemed to 
>>> get buggier and buggier, with application not running right, windows 
>>> freezing up bla bla bla...
>>>
>>> So I decided to do the dirty and reinstall fedora 10 from scratch. They 
>>> way I got to fedora 10 in the first place was through an upgrade from 
>>> fedora 8. What a difference...
>>>
>>> It comes down to this basic principle which I should follow from now 
>>> on.... Never upgrade, always install. The only think that I can think of 
>>> is that there was too much crud from fedora 8 laying about after the 
>>> upgrad to fedora 10 that things didn't quite work. It's not so much that 
>>> old fc8 rpms were laying about, but fc8 settings and configurations were 
>>> left in place instead of running the new fc10 settings. Anyway, a fresh 
>>> install of fc10 fixed all that.
>>>   
>>>       
>> I've never had a successful upgrade with Red Hat and its offshoots - I 
>> haven't even tried in a few years after some really dismal experiences.
>>     
>
> Erm, "a few years" is a LONG time in Linux distribution time. Hell, "a
> few years" ago, Ubuntu didn't even exist. So I don't think that's such a
> useful data point.
>
> Regardless, I'm really quite curious why people have had such problems
> with upgrades. I've done rolling upgrades from release to release dating
> back to Red Hat Linux 6.2. Certainly, there have been bumps here and
> there (particularly when moving from a 2.4 kernel to a 2.6 kernel w/a
> disk controller that used a completely different driver between the
> two), but I've certainly never had any disastrous end results, nor have
> I ever had to resort to a clean install. My only guess is that problems
> typically involve systems with lots of software NOT shipped by the
> distro...
>
> My contrasting experiences:
> My laptop was originally installed with pre-F8 rawhide, ran F8 for a
> while, updated to pre-F9 rawhide, ran F9 for a while, updated to pre-F10
> rawhide, now running F10. Last time I did a clean install on my mail/web
> server machine was when I moved it to a new motherboard aboutt three
> years ago. Pretty sure it was originally Fedora Core 5. Today, it runs
> Fedora 10, and its run every version in between. My myth backend server
> has changed hardware a few times now, but the last time it was clean
> installed was Fedora Core 6. Its now running Fedora 10, and has run
> everything in between. (Side note, my mythtv database on said machine
> still contains data going back to October of 2003...). My Mac Mini
> frontend was originally installed w/F7, has been upgraded from release
> to release, now runs F10 too. And so on.
>
> Clean installs are nice once in a while, but I typically only bother
> with such things for new hardware or test systems. Of course, take
> everything I said here with a grain of salt, given that I get paid to
> work on the distro itself, so I'm not your typical end-user... But I
> really do wonder why others have had such problems.
>
> --jarod
>
>
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>
>   
Hi Jarod,

the key to your story is that you upgrade on every release. And from the 
way you've described your work, you probably pay a lot of attention to 
the details of the setups of all the services and new software packages 
that come and go. It's the time and effort spent on these details that 
can make systems work smoothly or not....

One point I need to make is that I'm very fussy about how a system works 
and how smooth it operates. The upgrade went OK and fedora 10 was 
operational, it was that window freezup, or the fact that automatic 
package update system stopped working etc that got under my skin.... If 
I had the time, I could go and figure out what went wrong with the half 
dozen or so issues and fix them by updating configuration files and 
reinstalling packages. But I just don't have the time for that kind of 
detailed attention to system maintenance.... (Which is actually an art 
form...)

cheers!






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