Bob wrote:
At Fri, 4 Jun 2010 15:16:05 -0400 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
<snip>
I'm running CentOS 4.8 and have some DVD's for 5.4. I have a lot of customized and additional software installed and would like to avoid starting over with a scratch install. After the upgrade from the DVD I would do a yum upgrade to 5.5.
Is this a workable (and safe) thing to do? What should I look out for?
What I did was carve out fresh /, /usr, and /var file systems out of my VG (I had enough free space) and did a fresh install, using the *existing* /boot file system. I thus created a dual boot system: 4.8 AND
<snip>
I would recomend *against* trying to do a direct upgrade -- it is too likely to leave some cruft behind, which could cause all many of problems later on.
It is officially (according to RH, AFAIK) NOT recommended to go up a full release by update. Subreleases are fine, but you want a clean install for a new release (that is, 4.x to 5.x).
I recommend what Bob suggested; in fact, I have an article that was published in SysAdmin magazine a few years ago saying just that. (If you want to read the article, it's a link at http://24.5-cent.us, and it was called Upgrading Linux).
mark