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I am a professional programmer, using Fedora 10 (and a host of other packages individually installed). I use my system to telecommute.

Every year or so, I go through the ritual dance, usually with a second computer and a KVM switch as I don't have office space for two monitors, to build the next version of Fedora and install all my favorite apps.

Is there a better way? At least a nice way to keep track of what I need to 'add on' so that I don't have to manually install my app collection?

Also, I keep /home on a separate raid-ed drive set so I can also fall prey to 'old-config-file-itis'.

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4 Answers 4

Mount root on a seperate partition to ~/, then you just have to install the new version into your / partition, keeping all your apps/data as they were in the 1st place... That's what I always do anyway...

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Also, you can export a list of installed packages like so: yum list installed > /tmp/yum-list.txt –  Ed Morgan Dec 21 '09 at 15:35

You could also just use Debian, then you don't need to reinstall, you can just update :-).

Seriously: Fedora has a nice package manager with dependency tracking. You should not need to reinstall. Why do you feel the need to do so?

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As for updating there is a pretty good guide in the Fedora wiki. The procedure works reasonably well when you go in small version steps. And updates should not need to touch /home/ anyway.

If instead you just need to repeatedly install a bunch of the same software on different machines, you can just note the list of packages in a textfile once and then feed that to yum when you set up a machine:

$ cat fav_packages.txt

$ yum install `cat fav_packages.txt`

This way you will only get what you really want. Would you feed it the full list of installed packages instead you might pull in a lot of dependencies that might not be needed anymore.

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Why not just upgrade Fedora directly? Install the preupgrade package and then run preupgrade os root. This will prompt you for which fedora version to upgrade to. After you choose one it just download all needed packages and then install the upgrade. Nice and easy.

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