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'You're missing the point. First, I believe this is meant to compete with VMWare Workstation, not VMWare server. And, therefore, it is giving vmware a run for their money if they just have equal features - beacause VirtualBox is free, VMWare isn't.'

I'm running 64-bit Linux under 32-bit XP using VMWare Player, with a VM created using EasyVMX:

http://www.easyvmx.com/

and VMWare tools extracted from Workstation:

http://www.brandonhutchinson.com/Installing_VMware_Tools_with_VMware_Player.html

This is a free (but not Free) solution that does everything I need and (once it's set up) is as slick as Workstation in normal usage. But it'll be interesting to give VirtualBox a try now that this feature is available. Incidentally, the VMware VM can't address any more memory than the host OS, but I still find this setup useful for binary compatibility with my native 64-bit Linux installation.

I have use the yum upgrade method for quite some time. You may wish to check out the Fedora yum upgrade faq at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq - there is also a non-official guide to using yum to upgrade a number of RedHat distributions at http://www.brandonhutchinson.com/Upgrading_Red_Hat_Linux_with_yum.html

You may want to make sure you read some of the gotchas as if you have packages that are not from the Fedora Project and they are not upgraded or compatible with the newer version you are upgrading to you may need to delete them.

Note also that there are some difficulties in the x84_64 CPU architecture as more things become native 64-bit and thus some conflicts with older releases may happen...

I have use the yum upgrade method for quite some time. You may wish to check out the Fedora yum upgrade faq at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq - there is also a non-official guide to using yum to upgrade a number of RedHat distributions at http://www.brandonhutchinson.com/Upgrading_Red_Hat_Linux_with_yum.html

You may want to make sure you read some of the gotchas as if you have packages that are not from the Fedora Project and they are not upgraded or compatible with the newer version you are upgrading to you may need to delete them.

Note also that there are some difficulties in the x84_64 CPU architecture as more things become native 64-bit and thus some conflicts with older releases may happen...

I'd rather go for a distro that doesn't have quite such an aggressive turnover in major versions, or at least makes the upgrade less of a chore (apt dist-upgrade).

You mean like this?

The howto I followed is here.

I'm sorry, but you're absolutely wrong in this respect. I have upgraded to the next distribution at last twice that I can recall, using Yum.

See HERE for the "secret recipe."

It was relatively painless.

As you can see from the site, it has been possible to upgrade distributions using Yum since FC1--so I'm not sure where you got your information.

I used to use APT with Fedora, until FC4 when Yum became facile enough to use on an ongoing basis. Since then, I've abandoned APT entirely. The fact that the Fedora project officially supports Yum, and that they have improved it dramatically over the past year, seals the deal for me.

This is the first time since I've been using Fedora Core (and I've used it since Core 1) that I failed to be able to upgrade my server from the DVD-ROM.

I don't know what the deal was with it. At first it would "hang" at various stages of the install. Then, my system didn't seem to recognize the DVD as "bootable."

Finally, I tried a Yum upgrade, but it's just too soon after release for that--I actually had an easier time getting the DVD-R image via Bittorrent than using Yum. As it was, all the mirrors timed out--too busy.

FINALLY, I was able to follow this guy's recipe for setting the DVD up as a Yum repository, and that worked like a charm. I was even able to rsync the "updates" from kernel.org.

One HUGE saving grace though: For some reason, when I upgraded to FC4 last year, I completely lost X on my server. I have been running everything from the command line--not really that big a deal, but I couldn't even use remote X to get a graphical desktop. Puzzling.

Well, after the upgrade to FC5 as described above, *voila*! X is back! I now have that beautiful now Gnome desktop that FC5 has been getting raves for. It's just nice to have.

Anyway, that's the report from here.

That sounds quite appealing! Here is a page with more detailed instructions.

On the plus side, my 400GB LVM volume didn't get lost in the upgrade, so I should be grateful ;-)

Oh, I upgraded using yum BTW and it all went fine. IIRC, you have to install the later version kernel first, then reboot, then run yum, so that it gets the correct distribution. Here's the how-to I followed.

When FC6 comes out, I'll take a look at upgrading to FC5.

You might want to check this out. It's not half as complicated as it seems and has always worked for me.
Regards,
steve

I plan on following them later this morning ...
I read this Yum Update Upgrade link above, and it says
"Before proceeding, please read Seth Vidal's post (Seth is the author of yum) to the fedora-test-list mailing list regarding upgrading from FC2 to FC3 using yum."

The message from the developer of Yum says (among other things):

* dev->udev upgrade makes it impossible to open a new terminal
* ...
* I'm sure there will be other problems.not be the time to try this new mechanism, if you're looking to upgrade a working system. The summaries I saw seemed to recommend anaconda.

If you are already running Fedora Core 2, then you can use yum to upgrade to Core 3. (yum is like apt.)

Read these good instructions on how to do this yum upgrade.

I plan on following them later this morning and so I won't be part of the bottleneck downloading the .isos.

Reverse SSH tunnelling is your friend.

I have not had problems checking mail from anywhere.