[CentOS] Upgrading from CentOS 5.6 to 6.0

[Lanny Marcus]

On Sat, Jul 23, 2011 at 5:41 PM, Thomas Dukes <tdukes at sc.rr.com> wrote:
> Just ran the installation DVD but there is no option to 'upgrade'. Looked at
> the RHEL docs,
> http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Installati
> on_Guide/ch-guimode-x86.html#id4594292 referenced off the CentOS Release
> notes but the CentOS installation doesn't offer the 'upgrade'.
>
> I use to be able to upgrade by doing a 'yum update'. That doesn't work
> either.
>
> Guess I'm stuck with 5.6 as I an not about to install a new version and have
> to rebuild all non-rpm packages from scratch. This is worse than Microsoft!!

@Thomas: I'm a "newbie" home user, with CentOS on our Desktops, and
Red Hat Linux, before that.

I do not believe you understand the philosophy behind CentOS (an
Enterprise OS) or RHEL (the upstream distro). This is a distro with a
*LONG* life, and without the "latest and greatest", for security and
stability reasons.

It has always been recommended to do a "Clean Install" when moving
from one major version (ie: 5.x) to a newer version (ie: 6.x) and then
to Restore your data, from your backup.

If you do it in some other fashion, there are apt to be problems,
which will probably not be supported on this list.  If you break it,
you will fix it.

There is a lot of information available, on CentOS.org in the Wiki.
HowTos, FAQs, etc. If you look there, you will find many things
explained clearly.

Also, if you search the archives of the mailing list, you will find a
ton of information, from a large group of highly knowledgeable users.
People who work with CentOS in the Enterprise, all day, every day.

Installing non RPM software on an RPM Distro like CentOS is frowned
upon. That is the worst way to do it. There are 3rd party Yum
repositories, with lots of things that have been packaged for CentOS
and you can install them with Yum, once you have the Repository data
ready for yum.  You probably won't need to rebuild many packages, if
any, if you use the 3rd party repositories. GL