Wednesday Why: Getting an F8 LVM System Ready for F9

Fedora 9 is only a few days away, as the counter on the front page testifies. Although it's possible to upgrade an earlier Fedora system to F9, it's generally agreed that a fresh installation is cleaner and has less potential for problems. If your system uses LVM (which has been the default for the last several Fedora releases), it's particularly easy to perform a fresh installation while maintaining access to your previous data, because you can create new Logical Volumes within your existing Volume Group. You can then mount your old filesystems and migrate data over with ease.

This type of installation will be covered in the upcoming F9 Focus Week, but in order to prepare for it, you'll need some free space within your volume group -- I'd recommend at least 6-10 GB. If you're not really comfortable with the LVM commands, you can explore and adjust your LVM configuration using the system-config-lvm tool; however, to reduce the size of a logical volume and free up some space, the filesystem within that logical volume must be unmounted -- and in the case of the root filesystem, that means that the system can't be running in its normal way, which pretty much precludes the use of system-config-lvm. To reduce the size of the root filesystem, see the article on Using LVM In Rescue Mode from System Recovery Week.

(Note the links above -- sorry if they're not very visible or obvious due to the styling).

Update: KageSenshi points out that system-config-lvm is on the Fedora live disc images. You can resize the root filesystem on the hard disk by simply booting from a live disc and running the system-config-lvm command from a terminal window.