I have tried for the last two days to find out an authoritative answer on this one, so I’m putting this here in the hopes that the next person won’t have to waste quite so much of their time. If you boot to a Fedora Core 2 CD, it will indeed detect RedHat 8 and offer to upgrade it to Fedora 2.

More details later. Specifically, I need discs 1-4, and I have only made 1.3 so far, so I don’t actually know for certain if this upgrade will be painless and non-destructive.

While I suppose I should have just tried rather than wasting all that time, I was concerned that I would lose data in the experiment. Also, I had hoped to save myself the time of downloading ISOs if it wasn’t going to work at all.

So, check back tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll have an upgraded Fedora machine by then, and, hopefully, it won’t be crippled by the experience. I suppose either way I’ll have a Fedora machine. If it cripples me, then I’ll probably back up critical data and start from scratch. I’d just rather not do that, since I invariably lose data in such a transition.