Upgrade-Story

Shea's Upgrade Story

I'm actually an extreme case of "upgrade". My main Linux mache at home is actually a mixed case of desktop and server. I let it do everything from services like Mysql, Apache with wiki, Owncloud, webmail and many own projects, postfix, IMAP, DNS, DHCP, LDAP, Jabber, MythTV and desktop apps like mp3/video player, image processing, video editing, web browser, editors, office tools and games. I use mostly vendor packages, but have a lot of 3rd party repositories activated, and compile some software myself. At the moment the machine has over 4000 packages installed.

I rember first installing it with Redhat 4.2 - must have been in 1997. From there I upgraded the machine through all the releases up to Fedora 10. Sometimes I copied all files from the disk to a new, bigger one (I only had to reinstall the boot manager after that) , sometimes the disk moved into a new PC with all new components, but I never did a reinstall. Moving the disk to a new system didn't cause many problems either. Sometimes I had to reconfigure drivers for graphics, sound and network devices, but I'd have to do similar with a fresh install too.

Then when I upgraded to Fedora 11 in 2008 the process failed in the middle of the upgrade. I was forced to do a fresh install. Since then I upgraded the machine up to Fedora 22.

After the upgrades not everthing was working always. Most times it was because some software component changed its configuration scheme and my old configuration file didn't work anymore. But in those cases I had changed the old configuration file myself and figured out how to fix it quite easily.

New technology comes to the old system this way too. For example the latest upgrade changed my gdm to use Wayland instead of X11. The change from init to systemd worked flawlessly some releases ago. And of course all the software is at current versions after an upgrade.

I remember only one thing that the reinstall with Fedora 11 fixed: Before the reinstall my system used iso-8859-1 as charset and as I'm German my umlauts were encoded that way. At that time many files were utf-8 encoded already and not all parts of the system converted them properly, so that I saw broken umlauts in some places. With the reinstall I used utf-8 and those errors were gone. But then I had to convert all my amassed files to utf-8 (both content and filenames).

All in all I'm quite sure I saved a lot of time by upgrading instead of fresh install, because I use so many services that would have to be reconfigured. And I have enough experience with Linux to fix the small problems that might occur after an upgrade.