My main computer is a laptop I’ve upgraded from Redhat 9 through Fedora Core 2. The interesting thing about upgrading the OS instead of installing from scratch is that the upgrader only upgrades the packages you already had. It often won’t install new packages that are included in the new version, but aren’t strictly required to run.
The extended entry below contains a list of packages I’ve noticed weren’t installed on my machine, but definitely should have been. I will update the list as I notice new packages I’ve been missing.
- yum: absolutely required. Provides slow but intelligent package management
- rhgb: cool graphical bootup
- prelink: optimizes libraries to improve application start time