I had an idea on how to make the upgrade process easier for my Fedora installation. I had Fedora 12 installed and wanted to upgrade to Fedora 13 with the same programs installed. The same concept can be applied to most distributions.
Instructions:
1. On my Fedora 12 box:
rpm -qa | cut -d – -f 1 > packages.txt
This command will print all the installed packages and remove the version information and architecture.
2. Install Fedora 13.
3. Copy packages.txt from Fedora 12 to Fedora 13.
4. Copy .repo files in /etc/yum.repos.d from Fedora 12 to Fedora 13.
5. yum install -y –skip-broken `cat packages.txt`
6. Done. =)