Upgrading CentOS 5 to Fedora 12

Its time to update an old post about updates: Fedora 7 is again rather old, with the current Fedora being at 12, and 13 is right around the corner, but We’re still with CentOS 5 (I hear that RedHat is deep into beta with their next version – 6 but when it comes out is anyone’s guess).

In the mean time, if you want to run something a bit more modern maybe you’d want to upgrade your CentOS installation to Fedora 12 which can be considered pretty stable after a few months on the market. The reasons for the change may be numerous – maybe you need to run the latest subversion (with better merge tracking) or a new version of Ruby. Either way, if upgrading from CentOS 5 to Fedora 7 was a pain, guess how it is more the two years later?

Before we get to the action itself, I would be remiss if I would not recommend you to reconsider what you are about to do – this is a challenging exercise for many system admins and can sometimes end badly. I do not guarantee anything and if it breaks you get to keep both parts. Often its much faster and easier to just go to the server, stick a Fedora 12 DVD in the slot, reboot and let the DVD upgrade your system1. That being said, this is fun if you’re into that sort of thing, so if you’re still with me, lets dive in!

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  1. another safer options would be to upgrade to Fedora 7 using the instruction in the previous article linked above, and then use Fedora’s preupgrade tool to upgrade to Fedora 8, then to fedora 10, and from there to Fedora 12, though this procedure will also require physical access to the machine and multiple reboots and multiple long downloads []