[Discuss] Fedora upgrade experience

[John Blomfield]

Hope some of the following will help some newbies

As you no doubt recall, from my earlier list comments, I am a long turn 
Fedora user and I have recently been experimenting with Ubuntu and 
Kubuntu, which I installed on the old computer I use for backups.  This 
box is normally only run for a about an hour each week when I decide I 
had better do a backup but because of all the experimentation it has 
been on non-stop for several days.  Well one of the two hard drives 
crashed!  I had been running Fedora 7 on the backup box and Fedora 6 on 
my main ( only slightly newer ) computer and my laptop.  I had a nice 
spare 80GB drive handy so I decided now was the time to get up to date 
with Fedora 8 everywhere.  However, the 80GB is way more than I need for 
backing up my /home directory so I divided it into four 20GB partitions. 
First partition for Fedora 8, second for /home backup, third and four 
partitions to be used for experimenting with Ubuntu, Kubuntu or any 
other distro than takes my fancy. Incidentally the second hard drive I 
use for backing up my laptop and a /swap partition.  Its a good idea to 
have your /swap on another drive for better performance.

Installing, Fedora 8 using the KDE live version (there is also a GNome 
version) was straight forward with no hitches and since only basic 
functionality is required to manage the backup no additional downloads 
were required.  However, as per my earlier emails I had had problems 
with Firefox java plugins and eventually found a solution on Ubuntu with 
the advent of the java-icedtea plugin. I was keen to test out Fedora 8 
which also makes java-icedtea available. It worked like a dream!  
Firefox is not included in the KDE live CD only in the GNOME live CD but 
like everything else it's available for download once you have a system 
installed.  The next step was to backup my main box onto the new hard 
drive which I did using:

john at orwell# rsync -vzab --delete /home/john deben:/mnt/orwell_backup/

deben is the backup box and orwell the main box.  In this case since it 
was an empty partition there was no need to use -b (which backups 
changed files) and --delete which deletes files removed from the source 
directory.  But more on this later!  rsync uses ssh encryption protocol 
and rsync will automatically prompt you to agree to exchange the 
appropriate keys if the ~/ssh/known_hosts file is empty.  However, when 
you change your installation you loose the keys on one side a connection 
is refused unless you save them somewhere and re-install them.  The 
easiest way is to just delete the key, for the changed computer, in the 
other computer and rsync will prompt you for a new key and supply one 
automatically.  This also assumes that you have a) set your firewall to 
allow ssh as a trusted service and b) that you have enabled and started 
the sshd daemon on both machines. This does not require a root password 
if both the source and the destination directories have the same user 
permissions but you will be asked for the user's password.  Now I am not 
sure how this all works for Ubuntu because you only have one password 
and sudo but I guess you will still require the password for the 
destination user. If you try to rsync to another user's directory or 
from a directory owned by root you need to run rsync as root or sudo or 
kdesu and supply the root password and also the user's password.

Next step was to install on my main box and I took the opportunity to 
partition my HD into / , /home, /usr/local, /boot and on another drive, 
/develop and a Fat32 partition for Xp backups.  On a third drive I have 
Xp and /swap.  My past experience has been that upgrading Linux OS is 
best done with a clean install and then recover the data from /home and 
possibly /etc and /usr/local as required because even with the same 
distro stuff gets moved around from version to version, application 
config formats change and links point to the wrong places.  I have found 
it takes more time tracking down the strange behaviour that results than 
it does to re-install applications.  Changing distro's makes a clean 
install more or less mandatory!  So we come to the question of 
recovering your data from /home. If you use the rsync command options 
mentioned above you will not only back up your data folders but also 
lots of hidden folders containing configuration files for various 
applications.  It risky recovering these for the same reasons mentioned 
above i.e. things change.  I avoided this by doing:

john at orwell# rsync -vzab --exclude=.*/*** deben:/mnt/orwell_backup/john/ 
/home/john/

the --exclude=.*/*** prevented any .hidden_directories and their 
contents being copied.  Using --delete here could also be dangerous 
because the hidden files may get deleted on the new install. Even so 
something somewhere that was not compatible got through and prevented 
klauncher from opening ANYTHING by double clicking!  I panicked and 
re-installed everything but it did it again.  Then I thought I know what 
works on Windows and rebooted!!  Everything sorted itself out : ) : ).  
Any applications that you have installed that are not part of the distro 
repository need to be reloaded, compiled etc and links to various 
applications have to be restored.  One important issue in my case is to 
get all my old bookmarks for Firefox and all my old emails (500MB worth, 
I must house clean) have to be recovered.  I do this be copying the 
backup hidden file ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxx.default into the new 
~/.mozilla/firefox/ .
In the profiles.ini file in the same directory i.e.

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=yyyyyy.default

 edit to replace the Path=yyyyyy.default with Path=xxxxxx.default. 
The process is similar for Thunderbird in ~/.thunderbird/

Hope this is of interest.

John Blomfield