[LON-CAPA-admin] upgrading from version 2.6.3

[Gerd Kortemeyer]

Hi,

On May 26, 2010, at 5:49 PM, Stuart Raeburn wrote:

> I would, however, recommend updating your FC8 Linux distro when convenient. (For example this could occur later in the summer, e.g., after a LON-CAPA 2.6.3 -> 2.9.0 upgrade).  Fedora's official end of life for FC8 was 1/7/2009.  CentOS provides longer support times for its releases (e.g., CentOS 5 will receive full updates until 3/31/11, and maintenance updates until 3/31/14).


I would like to emphasize this point: Fedora, SuSE, Ubuntu, etc., are fun and user-friendly desktop systems, but not very fit for a server. Personally, I am very (very!) inclined to stop future support for these desktop distributions, but of course that needs to be a board decision. I did however take the liberty to set an end to the Commodore 64 support.

I would like to strongly encourage server administrators to instead run an "enterprise" or "server" distribution (CentOS, Redhat Enterprise, SuSE Enterprise), for the reason Stuart explains above. We had very good experiences with CentOS. Instructions for how to get CentOS going are at

 http://install.lon-capa.org/centos5_install.html

I know a number of you are taking this as an opportunity to upgrade your hardware. Please see

 http://www.lon-capa.org/hardwareupgrade.html

for how to accomplish this task. Do the hardware upgrade first and then immediately afterwards do the LON-CAPA upgrade. Note that we can go from 32-bit to 64-bit, but not vice versa.

If you would like to just upgrade your Linux distribution, see

 http://www.lon-capa.org/fedoracoreupdate.html

- while the URL says "fedoracoreupdate," this works for any distribution change. Note that there are some subtle hints embedded into that page, apparently sort of easily overlooked, since they are only in red and repeated a few times.

General instructions on how to upgrade LON-CAPA are still at

 http://install.lon-capa.org/upgrade.html

(note that it should say "cd loncapa-2.9.0" in the gray box for our current version). I did this on three very different machines for our current version, it worked without a single glitch, and it only takes a few minutes (we can thank Stuart for that).

- Gerd.