Upgraded the intranet server from Red Hat 8.0 “Phoebe” to Red Hat 9.0 “Shrike” yesterday. The slow part was the downloads – each CD takes about an hour over broadband (okay, that’s not much to complain about!), but disk 5 had to be downloaded 5 times before I got a clean copy. (Hint: use MD5Sums.exe to test the .iso without going to all the hassle of burning a copy that Linux tells you isn’t valid. Hint2: then run “linux mediacheck” on startup to make sure you’ve got a good copy).
Installation was smooth as silk: boot from the CD, tell it to upgrade the install it finds, confirm you want to upgrade all packages, walk away. Drop by two more times to insert CD 2 and 3 and you are up and running. All settings transferred, all(most) all software running. I say almost, regretably, because it looks like changes to the threading model (a real performance improvement, I hear) break Wine. There’s a workaround already, and the Wine folks are hard at work at a solid fix. Details and a good review of RH 9.0 are available here and here:
http://www.gurulabs.com/RedHatLinux9-review.html
http://www.winehq.com/index.php?issue=163#Making%20Wine%20Run%20With%20glibc%202.3