== My latest crazy plan to upgrade my home Linux machine

My home Linux machine has a [[little problem UpgradingFedora8]] in that
it's still running Fedora 8 and I now really want to upgrade it. (I was
quite enthused about Fedora 13, but I am now [[somewhat less enthused
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=658587]] about Fedora 14.)

Now, I will admit that the real solution is to buy more or less all of
a new machine to replace my now four and a half year old and slightly
flaky hardware, install Fedora whatever on that hardware, take it home,
and copy all of my data over. But, well, [[buying hardware for Linux is
kind of a pain HarwareBuyingAnnoyance]] so I keep coming up with crazy
upgrade plans so that I can avoid it.

The latest crazy plan relies on the twin facts that I have unused
duplicate system partitions and that my home workstation is basically a
clone of my office workstation in the first place. It goes like this:

* buy a large hard drive in a USB enclosure; I need one for backups
  anyways.
* dump my office workstation's system filesystems to the drive and
  take it home.

* restore the office system filesystems to the unused system partitions.
  Since my office workstation is an up to date Fedora 14 system,
  this will give me the filesystems of an 'upgraded' system; it
  just won't have my home machine's customizations.

* at my leisure, customize these filesystems to have the changes I need
  for my home machine.
* when customization is complete, boot from the Fedora 14 filesystems
  instead of my existing Fedora 8 install. If it works, great, I'm done;
  if not, I can boot back into Fedora 8 and do more work.

This will give me a somewhat tangled machine, but it's not as if my
current Fedora install is a beautiful clean thing; after all, it dates
from 2006 and has been upgraded successively since then.

(I know that Fedora recommends reinstalling from scratch instead of
upgrading, but I find that both infeasible and too annoying. If I was
going to do that regularly, I would need a rather different system setup
than I currently have.)