2. Installation-Related Notes

2. Installation-Related Notes

The following section includes information specific to installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the Anaconda installation program.

Note

When updating from one minor version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (such as 4.5 to 4.6) to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.7, it is recommended that you do so using Red Hat Network, whether through the hosted web user interface or Red Hat Network Satellite.

If you are upgrading a system with no available network connectivity, use the "Upgrade" functionality of Anaconda. However, note that Anaconda has limited abilities to handle issues such as dependencies on additional repositories or third-party applications. Further, Anaconda reports installation errors in a log file, not interactively.

As such, Red Hat recommends that when upgrading offline systems, you should test and verify the integrity of your upgrade configuration first. Be sure to carefully review the update log for errors before applying the upgrade to your production environment.

In-place upgrades between major versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (for example, upgrading from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.7) is not supported. While the "Upgrade" option of Anaconda allows you to perform this, there is no guarantee that the upgrade will result in a working installation. In-place upgrades accross major releases do not preserve all system settings, services, and custom configurations. For this reason, Red Hat strongly recommends that you perform a fresh installation when planning to upgrade between major versions.