Hi,

I just installed RHE 5 on a Dell PowerEdge 6850 that will be used only as a workstation to do research calculations. I would like to upgrade to RHE 6 and purchase a subscription. It would be an academic purchase. Must I purchase the server edition or would the workstation edition be adequate? In the past, I have bought the CDROM installation kit because the only way I knew to install was booting from the CDROM. Is there a way to boot from the downloaded installer?

seeing as upgrades between major versions has never been supported
you need to do a fresh install of RHEL 6.2 Desktop ( the $ 299USD )
unless you DO want to run a server ( the $1299USD )

or install ScientificLinux 6.1 ( soon to be 6.2) it is Free BUT you do ALL your own support

Upgrade of major versions has been unsupported since the first enterprise release (RHEL). There are instructions and how-to pages that document some procedures to accomplish an upgrade in-place, but they all mention that RH does not support anything but a clean install migration.

If you decide to seek out and try one of those in-place migrations, I suggest you first ensure that you have at least two sets of complete backup media that could be used to totally restore your system: just in case.

I have never understood why this is so difficult. IBM has procedures for a "preservation install" that upgrades a system to a new major release, though the documentation advises that a clean install is better. Debian has rolled forward on my systems almost forever with only one failure (the udev revolution). I have gotten used to migrating systems to new versions (a part of my career!) but it does not seem to me that it should be so painful.

This is (IMOHO) part of the real power of cloud computing, it offloads the upgrade pain from the users to the professional Sysadmin. The problem there is that not everything can be done in the cloud, and not everyone has an appropriate cloud to work in.


I wish you success.