New distro question

[Ben Scott]

On Tue, Apr 8, 2008 at 2:22 PM, Labitt, Bruce
<labittb1 at tycoelectronics.com> wrote:
>  [Labitt, Bruce] Is a Centos upgrade as ugly as a SuSE upgrade?  In other
>  words, save \usr, \home, install over everything?

  Every kind of head-wear Linux I've ever used has been able to
upgrade previous versions in-place.  I think the latest RHEL can
still, in theory, recognize and upgrade a Red Hat Linux 2.0
installation.  Of course, I wouldn't expect *that* to go so well, in
practice.  12 years is a lot of software rot.  But you should
certainly be able to upgrade CentOS 4.x to 5.x with minimal heartache,
assuming your configuration is reasonable vanilla.  Just boot the
installer disc and it should find your installation and ask you if
you'd like to upgrade.

  I'd still make a backup of everything.  :)  Things sometimes go
wrong -- that's a universal rule.  And if an OS upgrade goes wrong, it
generally leaves the system unusable.

-- Ben