Boston Linux and Unix InstallFest XXX1 Saturday November 22, 2008

[jarod-ajLrJawYSntWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org (Jarod Wilson)]

On Tue, 2008-11-18 at 16:46 -0500, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> On 11/18/2008 02:01 PM, Shawn Tinsley wrote:
> > Adding my $0.02, Red Hat 9 is also obsolete in terms of the kernel,
> > assuming one hasn't updated their box. The 2.4 kernel has a number of
> > issues that were resolved in 2.6 in terms of memory management,
> > specifically handling page caching, etc. So from an under the hood
> > perspective moving to a more up-to-date version would would have
> > knock on benefits no matter the gui.
> >
> The major distros have pretty well gotten it right according their 
> models. But, the one thing I would like to see is a continuous upgrade 
> (well Gentoo does this to some extent). What I mean is that you start 
> with Distro Version a. Along the way your system is upgraded 
> continuously such that when Version b. is officially released, you 
> already have it. rom a pure support point of view it would be a
> nightmare. There are certainly holes in my thought here. Take something 
> like KDE. Today, version a. might have KDE 3.x, and version b. might 
> have KDE 4. Could the KDE changeover be made seamless. I could argue 
> both for and against this approach, but the bottom line is to allow the 
> end user to maintain a relatively current system without having to do 
> something special. In the past, my experience with SuSE was that you had 
> to perform an install with the new version (from media or online), with 
> Ubuntu, it was a click on a button on a working system. I don't know how 
> Fedora is handling this.

Officially, the only way to update from one Fedora release to another is
via booting the installer, but that can be done a number of ways... Boot
the installer off a CD/DVD, boot a network install image, install the
"pre-upgrade" package, which does all the depsolving and required
package downloading on your running system, then adds a grub entry
that'll boot the installer, using the kernel/initrd/installer/packages
now sitting on your local machine.

Unofficially, upgrading via yum (or apt or smart) from one release to
another typically works just fine too.

Continuous updates, fairly analogous to Gentoo (and actually, more
up-to-date, at least kernel-wise) is what you get if you simply track
the Fedora development tree, aka rawhide. With Fedora's 6 month release
cycle, I tend to track the latest release for the first three months of
its life, while rawhide is undergoing the most drastic changes, then for
the next three months, I track rawhide, which is actually pretty stable,
just fast-moving.

--jarod