The Fedora Core 5 to Fedora Core 6 upgrade follows the general procedure outlined on the first Fedora Core upgrade page: RedHat Fedora: Fedora Core 1 to Fedora Core 2 Upgrade .  If you have not already upgraded to FC5 please visit  RedHat Fedora: Fedora Core 4 to Fedora Core 5 upgrade. page first before going up to FC6.

You will only need to replace step #8 with the below step:

8 ) Install fedora-relese either using http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/fedora-release-6-4.noarch.rpm or use another mirror from the fedora.redhat.com site.  You can also use the mirrors from fedoralegacy.org if your distribution is too old.

THE UPGRADE PROCESS

1) If you have not yet upgraded to the latest FC6 packages on your distribution, now would be a good time to run nice -n 19 yum update.  This will ensure you have the latest FC5 packages on your system including the latest yum version.

2) yum clean all

Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Cleaning up Everything
1819 headers removed
1779 packages removed
9 metadata files removed
0 cache files removed
3 cache files removed

3) Get the FC6 release using

rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/fedora-release-6-4.noarch.rpm

Then repeat this for

rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/fedora-release-notes-6-3.noarch.rpm

In my case I used

rpm -Uvh fedora-release-6-4.noarch.rpm fedora-release-notes-6-3.noarch.rpm

following wget the files off of the 'download.fedora.redhat.com' site to a temporary folder I have created for the upgrade.

4) Execute

nice -n 19 yum -y update 2>&1 | tee fc5tofc6-upgrade.txt

Reason for using the nice -n 19 is that this process is resource intensive and I need my system workable without having to put up with a sluggish and even unresponsive process when performing other actions during the upgrade.

5) Watch for package dependencies:

Error: Missing Dependency: libxfce4mcs-manager.so.2 is needed by package xffm
Error: Missing Dependency: libcdio.so.6(CDIO_6) is needed by package vcdimager
Error: Missing Dependency: libgnomecanvaspixbuf.so.1 is needed by package gtkhtml
Error: Missing Dependency: libxfcegui4.so.3 is needed by package xffm
Error: Missing Dependency: perl(:MODULE_COMPAT_5.8.3) is needed by package jcode.pl
Error: Missing Dependency: libiso9660.so.4 is needed by package vcdimager
Error: Missing Dependency: libxfce4mcs-client.so.2 is needed by package xffm
Error: Missing Dependency: libiso9660.so.4(ISO9660_4) is needed by package vcdimager
Error: Missing Dependency: libcdio.so.6 is needed by package vcdimager
Error: Missing Dependency: liblzo.so.1 is needed by package mplayer-mencoder
Error: Missing Dependency: liblzo.so.1 is needed by package mplayer
Error: Missing Dependency: libxfce4util.so.1 is needed by package xffm
Error: Missing Dependency: libdirectfb-0.9.so.24 is needed by package mplayer
–> Processing Conflict: autofs conflicts kernel < 2.6.17
–> Processing Conflict: hal conflicts kernel < 2.6.17

I've removed the old (prior 2.6.17) kernel, xfmm, mplayer*, vcdimager, jcode.pl, gtkhtml and xffm.  The only one I remembered using was mplayer.  When trying to remove dependencies by queriying their package names using rpm -aq <PACKAGE> you may find other rpm's to remove.  Following the removal of the above, I went ahead to rerun nice -n 19 yum -y update 2>&1 | tee fc5tofc6-upgrade.txt

Another error I received is: I/O warning : failed to load external entity " "

Failed to open ` ': No such file or directory

Which appears from the empty quote string to be harmless and a typo somewhere in the package being installed.  Can't be sure.  I ignored it and it didn't stop the installation.

ERROR YOU MAY RECEIVE

libsemanage.semanage_direct_remove: Module bootloader was not found.
semodule:  Failed on bootloader!
error: %trigger(selinux-policy-strict-2.3.7-2.fc5.noarch) scriptlet failed, exit status 1
libsemanage.semanage_direct_remove: Module bootloader was not found.
semodule:  Failed on bootloader!
error: %trigger(selinux-policy-strict-2.4.6-108.fc6.noarch) scriptlet failed, exit status 1

In the above case, you may need to remove selinux-policy-strict*.  Once you are done with the upgrade, you can reinstall it on your system with yum install selinux-policy-strict. After about 8 hours, the FC6 upgrade completed.  So now I'm ready to repeat all this with the upgrade to FC7.