Despite what several people have said about upgrading from Fedora Core 1 to Core 2, I decided to have a go on my linux box at home (the one this site runs on will have to wait until I have figured out how to upgrade from RedHat 7.3 to FC2).

The biggest sticking point was the fact that FC1 uses XFree86 and FC2 uses xorg-x11 and this meant I had to uninstall all the XFree86 packages to get the upgrade to work cleanly. Since it wasn’t a machine that runs X much, this wasn’t a problem.
Tip: Always use –dry-run first! It’ll show what’s going to happen without actually breaking your system.
The command I used once /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources was modified to include fedora-core-2 as a source was:
# up2date –upgrade-to-release=fedora-core-2 -u
The only casualties of the upgrade were:
– bind, since I’d replaced it with a home-compiled bind-dlz and the new one didn’t like the dlz part of the config file.
– httpd, due to an old module that wasn’t included in the new version.
– squid, a single line in the old config was supposedly invalid for the new version despite it being in the squid.conf.rpmnew config file albeit commented out.
All 3 casualties were easily fixed in a matter of minutes and the box didn’t even require a reboot although since glibc is upgraded it may be a good idea to reboot. I didn’t get the choice because we had a short power outage this morning (and no, I don’t have the machine on a UPS).