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

On Fri, Dec 29, 2006 at 09:58:25AM +0000, John Hearns wrote:
> 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.

Upgrade was an abbreviation for the process.  In fact, I am bringing a
new hard drive with installs from scratch, layering on the newest available
distro and then stuff from the old drive.  So I will have the old hard
drive intact (and can mount it in the ultrabay of the thinkpad), plus I
have daily backups of the old drive on my backup server. 

BTW, for backups I host an open source project called dirvish, which is
a Perl wrapper around rsync written by jwschultz.  You can find it at 
www.dirvish.org .  It is being used by the Oregon State University Open
Source Labs to back up the projects they host, including Mozilla and
Drupal and Gentoo, so it is fairly trustworthy. 

But back to not-really-an-upgrade:

> 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

And that is very useful information.  I will also be scrutinizing the
choice of gcc and libraries in SL5 alpha, and expect to use many of
those rpms on top of SL4.4 to build a good base.  

> 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

A possibility.  The path I am choosing for now is SL4.4 + SL5 rpms,
but I've made an FC6 install DVD, if necessary.  I will spend a little
time doing some version comparisons between FC6 and SL5 alpha.  The
main thing is, I don't want to stay on the Fedora merry-go-round, 
because Fedora often starts out with a few things broken, then is
clean and stable for a while, then reaches end-of-life rapidly.  I like
the idea of Scientific Linux, which will probably give me the longest
maintained lifetime of any distro out there.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          [log in to unmask]         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs