Fedora 12, upgrade or fresh-install?

Constantine, Fedora 12 is going to be out  soon. I am really excited and I bet every linuxer will be equally excited and looking forward to try it out. Most of you will be in a dilemma, whether to do an upgrade or a fresh-install? what's best for my system? In this article I will give you some tips and methods which will help you answer such questions.

Don't you just love your system after an upgrade or a re-install? The whole looks and feel has changed, sometimes things that were not working on your previous installation start working , its amazing. Even though you might not agree with me but I believe that the decision that you take at this point, if right, makes you love your new system even more. 

Here are some points that you should know before starting:

• If you are using Fedora 10 then you have an option to skip Fedora 11 and upgrade directly to Fedora 12.
• If you are comparing on the basis of improved performance then obviously a reinstalled system is better. Do a fresh install and restore your config using the backed up data.
• Finally, whatever you decide to go for, make sure that you back up all your important data on some external media.

Upgrade seems to be a better option when you have a lot of stuff installed on your system and you don't want to restore configurations for all of them after a fresh install. It seems right but there are certain limitations with an upgrade which you should know about before selecting that option:

• An upgrade installs the updated version of the packages which are currently installed on your system so your old configurations might not work due to changed configuration formats or layouts in the updated versions.
• The applications that you have manualy installed won't get upgraded so you will have to update them manually after the whole system upgrade is done.
• While upgrading, some packages may require the installation of other packages, which might not already be present in your system. The upgrade procedure takes care of this problem. But if you choose to customize your packages to upgrade then you will have to deal with the dependency issues yourself.
• This one is not a limitation but you should know about it. The upgrading process preserves the existing configuration files by adding a .rpmsave extension (e.g. if you config fie was confifile.ext then it will be saved as configfile.ext.rpmpassive).

There are certain good points with upgrade too.

• The upgrade updates the softwares to their latest versions but it doesn't remove any user data from the user's home directory.
• The existing partition structure of the hard disk doesn't change.
• Your system configuration is changed only if the upgraded software demands it (which happens rarely). Most of the upgraded softwares don't change system configuration but they install an additional config file instead for later examination.

Make sure to see that when you start restoring your config files after an upgrade, check if the file format or layout hasn't changed for that updated version. In case you want to see the logs of the upgrade, they are stored in  /root/upgrade.log.

Now, time for the final decision making.

If your highest priority is a light and fast system then you should go for a fresh install (that's my view). But if you have a highly configured system then take a backup of all your data and configuration files and go for upgrade.

Remember the things about the configuration files I have mentioned above. Someone of them might not work at first but even then an upgrade would prove to be better than a whole reinstall where you would have to install and configure all the softwares and settings on your system manually. And just in case the upgrade fails and you have no option left other than a reinstall, you always have the backed up data to restore your whole system. So, data loss won't a problem in any scenario.

And finally, I will once again say that whatever method you choose please make sure to take the backup of your data and config files in an external storage device because data backed up on another partition is not safe.

I hope this article will surely help many of you linuxers. I will soon write an article about fedora upgrade, make sure you don't miss it . If you have any comments, doubts or want to add/remove somethings from this article feel free to comment.