RedHat 8.0 Upgrade Thoughts

[Jeffrey Pyne]

I upgraded my home RedHat 7.3 machine to RedHat 8.0 about a week ago.  This
is the first time I've tried upgrading instead of re-installing since my
RedHat 4.2 -> 5.0 upgrade attempt went so poorly several years ago.  This
time the upgrade went almost perfectly.  I use my machine to read email
(Evolution), burn CDs (cdrdao, xcdroast, gtoaster), surf the web (Mozilla),
host a few dynamic web sites (Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl DBI), listen to MP3s
(XMMS), download and burn live music in SHN and FLAC format (gftp,
BitTorrent, shorten, flac), do some web programming (Komodo), download
pictures from my digital camera (USB mass storage driver), edit said
pictures (Gimp), and share files with the Windows and Solaris computers on
my network (samba, NFS).  I use KDE as my windowing environment.  After the
upgrade, all of this stuff worked with two minor exceptions:  

1) I had to download and install an MP3 plugin for XMMS.  This is a known
issue due to licensing issues with MP3.  I found a link to an RPM of the
plugin on the XMMS web site, so fixing this took about 10 seconds.

2) Before the upgrade, I was using Apache 1.3.27.  As part of the upgrade,
Apache was upgraded to 2.0.40.  There were some 1.3-specific directives in
my /etc/httpd/httpd.conf that caused Apache to not start.  I simply had to
copy my customizations (e.g. Virtual Server configuration) into
/etc/httpd/httpd.conf.rpmnew, and then 'mv /etc/httpd/httpd.conf.rpmnew
/etc/httpd/httpd.conf'.  After that Apache started up just fine and all of
my virtual (name-based) domains work like a champ.  Fixing this took about a
minute.

Everything else worked perfectly after the upgrade.  My Evolution mail was
still there, my Mozilla settings were intact, my KDE customizations were
still there, my MySQL databases still worked, my Samba and NFS shares still
functioned, sound, X, and networking all still worked, etc., etc.  The new
Mozilla and Evolution are purty, as are the fonts and icons in KDE3.  I was
extremely impressed with how smoothly the upgrade went.  'Til now I have
been leery of x.0 releases from RedHat, and of upgrading in general, but
this experience has changed my mind.

YMMV.

~Jeff