[Anyone who plans on crying about my recommendation of a specific distro can feel free to provide an alternative -- a question was asked, I'm giving an answer]
On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 01:33:47PM +1000, Luke Kendall wrote: > AFAIK, no Linux distro is considered quite safe to upgrade from one > release to the next (e.g. from SuSE 9.2 to SuSE 10.0, or FC 4 to FC 5). > > Wise people still routinely advise "Install the new system on a spare > partition, and switch over when it's properly installed and configured". I've never had to do that with my Debian/Ubuntu boxes -- I've upgraded one machine from Woody (Debian 3.0), to Sarge (Debian 3.1), to Hoary (Ubuntu 5.04), and I'm about to upgrade it to Dapper (Ubuntu 6.06 LTS) via Breezy (Ubuntu 5.10) sometime. I've already done one workstation (with some fairly customised GNOME config) from Sarge to Dapper via Hoary and Breezy, so I know it can be done. There was effectively zero breakage on that whole upgrade path (I had to tweak the Eclipse config to use Real Java, and readjust the sound volume to a reasonable default -- about 5 minutes work all told). > The problem with this is that if you've tweaked things so that sendmail > is running nicely, and you have all the RealPlayer and Flash 7 and > innumerable video codecs installed, and your soundcard working well and > the DVD burner (and TV card?) etc. etc. all working well - then you > have to do all this work afresh on the new system, and that can take > days. Which is why you use a distro which actually respects your configuration files, or else use a configuration management system to apply all of your settings whenever they go away (which, for a single home workstation, is what we call "Massive Overkill"). > So: does anyone know of a Linux distro that is so easily managed and so > well structured, that not only can you easily update all your packages > (via apt or yum or whatever), but you can even upgrade the whole > distro, 99.99% reliably? Debian and Ubuntu both have this capability. I know people who have gone through 3 or 4 releases of Debian without a reinstall. I've got one machine under my nominal control which is now 3 releases behind the latest Ubuntu, and I have no intention of reinstalling it from scratch when I get around to upgrading it -- I intend to simply upgrade to each successive release to bring it up to date. - Matt -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
