[CentOS] centos 3.3 to 4.x?

Thu Jan 4 21:00:40 UTC 2007
Phil Schaffner <Philip.R.Schaffner at nasa.gov>

On Thu, 2007-01-04 at 07:03 -0800, R Lists06 wrote:
<snip>
> Anyone ever upgrade from 3.x to 4.x

Yes, with anaconda and the "upgradeany" option.  Upgrades across major
kernel and glibc versions are at best very difficult with yum/apt-get.
The most likely result of attempts to upgrade across major versions with
package management tools is a broken system.

> without problem

Not really.  Expect lots of left-over orphan packages and problems with
system and end-user configurations.

> and how so?

Use "rpm -qa --last" to find packages that pre-date the upgrade and deal
with them by removal and/or forced/manual updates.  Look for all the
*.rpm* files in /etc/... and reconcile differences with current versions
of config files.  Fix numerous user GUI/application problems.

Or [highly recommended], back up config files and user files to
accessible media and do a clean install.  Use the backup as
model/example to configure the new system.  Create new user home
directories and selectively copy/link stuff as required from the backup.
Keeping old GNOME/KDE configurations in place is guaranteed to cause
problems.  I like to keep the old installation on-line and still
bootable and accessible and do a fresh install on a separate hard disk
(or at least on separate partitions) and be able to boot back to the
previous version as a fall-back.

Phil