Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> 
> 
> Right now, I have some downtime to do a few days of upgrades, but
> I will not have much time when SL5 rolls out.  I want to upgrade a
> laptop that is currently running RH 9 (!), with many accumulated
> proprietary CAD tools and odd bits of hand-crafted numerical code,
> and it will be a lot of compilation work and dependency hell to get

I think "upgrade" is the wrong term here.
I remember doing an upgrade from a system running RH9 to Fedora Core 1,
and I still have the scars (as I recall, there are a few files you have 
to change 'by hand' or it won't work). I spent a long time on this one.

I'm sure you meant this anyway, but back up your home directories, 
applications, and all information in /etc/  (and anything else) and just 
install a fresh system.

Can't answer you on choice between FC6 and SL5.
FC6 is working pretty well on my laptop (don't run it anywhere else).
I think the biggest change you will find is the GCC version
gcc version 4.1.1 20061011 (Red Hat 4.1.1-30) on this machine,
glibc 2.5-3

You're mostly looking at application porting from RH9.
So my advice, for what its worth, install Fedora 6 on a new machine.
You'll have a stable platform to do the porting and be ready for SL5 or 
Redhat 5
Others will have better advice.


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