On Sun, 8 Aug 2004, Doug Mayer wrote:

Hello,

Does anyone know if it is possible to move from RHEL ES 3 to CentOS-3.1? I've seen How-To's for RH9 --> CentOS-3, but nothing for the more horizontal move of EL3 --> CentOS3.

Thanks in advance,

Definitely possible. I've done it a few times. Make a good backup first.

The main thing is that you need to install all of the centos yum packares and centos-release. The rest depends upon how up to date your RHEL3 is. If you have not applied any updates yet, then yum -y update will do most of the work, however, if you have applied RH updates, or there are packages that you have installed which have a "-centos" tag on the centos version of the RPM but are otherwise the same version, then the packages with corresponding "-centos" versions (httpd, for instance) won't be upgraded (err, did that make sense?)....

If you want to play it safe and be sure all of your packages are updated, you can install the centos yum and release packages, then grab a list of all of the packages that have a "-centos" release tag, and use yum to install those by hand before using yum to update the rest of it.

What you DON'T want to do is to use rpm and force the centos packages alongside the RHEL ones. If yum/rpm complains about the "-centos" version conflicting with the _same_version_ of the package, then backup your config, remove the RHEL package, and install the "-centos" version.

regards, -Ryan