[mythtv-users] Upgrade from Fedora 8 to CentOS 5.1

[Rich West]

kanetse at gmail.com wrote:
> Since the ivtv driver still hasn't been fixed for capturing closed
> captions with a PVR-250, I'm thinking of going back to an older kernel
> where CC capture was still working properly.  To settle on this, I
> have chosen CentOS 5.1.
>
> Is it possible for me to insert the CentOS DVD and just do an upgrade
> installaion, or will I have to reformat my whole system to get CentOS
> on there?
>
> Anyone have experience with this?
>
> Thanks!

I've had some experience moving from one arch to another (painful, but 
very successful) and from one distro to another, and I have to tell you, 
you will cause yourself a lot of headaches with attempting to "upgrade" 
to CentOS 5.1 from Fedora 8.  I have nothing against CentOS, but 
remember that it is based upon RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.1 (highly 
stable), which is typically behind the Fedora distro (more bleeding edge 
= less stability) with regard to the versions of packages and such.

Effectively, you would be 'downgrading', which might cause all sorts of 
headaches.

However, with that said, you would probably get the best feel for the 
whole process if you downloaded a free copy of VMWare server, created 
yourself a VM, copied your myth server install from your current server 
to the VM, and went through the upgrade within the VM to see how far you 
got.  Weigh that experience against performing a clean CentOS install + 
atrpms packages + mythtv configuration (back up the database and import 
it to the new install).  My bet is that you'll get things back up and 
running faster by performing a clean install.

If you have it, I'd also recommend performing the clean install on 
another disk so you can back out of the whole thing just by swapping 
hard drives in the event that it doesn't go as well as you had hoped.

-Rich