[TriLUG] Advice needed on system upgrade

[Aaron S. Joyner]

Rick DeNatale wrote:

>I've been running Linux for little over a year now, but I still consider
>myself a newbie.
>
>I'm planning to upgrade this system first with more memory and then
>upgrade the system.
>  
>
> <pertinent details snipped>

In my humble opinion, given that you want to change the distro, now is 
the time for an overhaul.  Changing up from RH9 to FC2(3,...) is not as 
straight-forward as one might hope (I'm not speaking from personal 
experience, as I have no interest in running FCx personally - but that 
has been the general opinion of those I know who do).  The upgrades are 
not entirely trust-worthy, and as you also already want to repartition, 
this is what I would suggest:
1) Create a valid partition in that 8G of free space.
2) Format it appropriately (ext2/3)
3)
    a) Copy any data you deem to be important... or
    b) Create a backup of all the data via tar cf - / | gzip > 
/newpartition/backup.tar
4) (optional) copy that data off somewhere else
5) Repartition the remaining space, being careful not to hurt your 
partition w/ the backup data, but otherwise adjusting as you see fit
6) Do a fresh install of FCx
7) Recover / restore your data and configuration files from the backup 
partition

If you optionally chose to do step 4, you will free up the ability to 
more dramatically change that extra space consumed by the partition you 
created in step 1.  You may also consider creating it 1GB smaller than 
it could be, in order to leave room for expanding your swap partition 
when you adjust the partitions.

Hope this is helpful!

Aaron S. Joyner