Upgrading Linux
Mark Roth
Most Linux distributions have upgrade paths with their installation. They are, however, usually only useful for a sub-release upgrade, such as from 7.1 to 7.2 or 7.3. However, I have yet to run into one that will successfully and cleanly upgrade from one release to the next full release -- they all suggest a clean install, including Red Hat and SUSE. When migrating from one distribution to another, regardless of whether you choose install or upgrade, the process simply fails because it is unable to successfully install numerous packages.
However, with some thought and a decent understanding of *Nix [1], it's possible to upgrade or migrate without too much pain and to fall back, if necessary, to your previous version without failure of multiple applications [2]. From my experience, the most important part of preparing for the upgrade is to think long and hard about how to partition your disks. I say that because, with proper design, you can have several versions on your system, all of which can be run with only minor single-user mode changes to your system.
Partitions
I recommend a small /boot partition; I'm currently assigning it 125 MB, and it should be a primary partition. Because this contains boot loader information, the initial ramdisk, and a few other files, none of which is huge (the 2.6 kernel is on the order of 2 MB), the size I've suggested will easily contain several versions of Linux and not be straining at the seams for years.
Next to consider is the root (/) partition, and this really should also be a primary partition. The reason I recommend that /boot and / be plain primary partitions is that, in case of partition or disk problems, it is far easier to recover with vanilla partitions, which have fewer layers of software and partition and directory tables to worry about.
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