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Was trying to upgrade Fedora Core on one of the servers. It is a virtual machine running under VMWare and is currently running FC3.

I would not need to upgrade it if it did not have a problem known to Linux running under VMWare - it looses time. Every second lasts twice as long and the clock on the virtual machine lags behind. Not a good thing, even if it can be worked around by synchronising time.

Did try to install VMWare Tools but it says there are no kernel modules ready for my system and compiling from sources fails. Therefore one of the options is to upgrade to FC4 or FC5 and see if the problem disappears or if the VMWare Tools would install or compile better.

The result so far: failure.

I did not have a DVD-ROM drive readily available so tried 2 other ways to install it: (a) by donwloading a DVD image and mounting it locally as described in "Upgrading from Fedora Core 3 to Fedora Core 4 -- quick upgrade using ISOs from HDD" which allowed me to boot into the installer but failed later on and (b) installing via HTTP which failed at the same place.

In both cases the installer would collect information about the system, start the installation and then fail with an error message "There was an error installing filesystem-2.3.4-1" suggesting there was a media error, not enough disk space or other failure. This is a critical failure and the installation stops.

Will try to upgrade to FC5 now. Maybe that will work better. I wanted to upgrade one version number up first but probably there is no reason to hesitate going to FC5 (unless it is not compatible with VMWare that we have).

There is also an option to upgrade using yum as described in YumUpgradeFaq and mentioned in "FC3 to FC4 Upgrade Process Question" but is it is less tested than using an installer.