Thanks for SL5!

I am currently upgrading two systems from SL44 to SL5 (the rest
are getting fresh installs).

Some surprises, so far:

If the SL44 machine is partitioned into a half dozen partitions (it
was easy to dump onto tape), it may crash during upgrade (red screen
covered with cyrillic yellow text. Hah!).  After six attempts failed
(different drives, machines, DVDs, etc) I merged everything but
/boot into /, and the upgrade finally worked.  It is hard to draw
firm conclusions from one success and many failures, but if you
have problems upgrading a multi-partition system, try merging them.

I do each upgrade on a "dd" copy of the original hard drive onto
a spare;  backing out of a failed upgrade is easier that way.

The upgrade added some packages I don't want;  a LOT of language
packs for OpenOffice.org, for example, as well as evolution and
spamassassin (which I don't need on my laptop, and add unnecessary
dependencies).  I will see what "yum remove" allows me to do.

The upgrade process paused for about 20 minutes in the middle while
loading "selinux-policy-targeted", and again after the last package
was loaded.  At first, I thought it was another failure, but there
was some random disk light activity, so I assume it was busy making
encrypted hashes (or sending my personal data to the NSA).

The upgraded machine tries to use Red Hat Network.  I stopped that
by removing the file  /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/rhnplugin.conf .

More as I learn about it;  perhaps those observations will help others.

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