Fedora 10 upgrade
In the past, I’ve been rather wary of upgrading my Fedora-running PC’s to the latest spin of the OS. I’ve had problems with the upgrade path, and found it easier to blow away everything except the /home partition and start over with a clean install. This does work, but I then have to spend a long time re-installing all of the customisations I make to the way things work, add back in my preferred packages, etc etc. Very dull, takes a long time. Feeling brave, I thought I’d give upgrading another throw of the dice. I burned a DVD from the torrent of Fedora 10, rebooted my Fedora 9 pc, and selected the upgrade existing OS option. First thing that I noticed is that it only asked me one question: what kind of keyboard did I have? Easy enough. Everything after that ran unattended. At the end, I reboot, and nervously watch the bootlog for problems. Nothing obvious, apart from CUPS not starting. Log back in, find a few things that seem a bit borked, but in general it’s looking good. Run yumex to get the latest updates: over a thousand of them, 1.5G of downloads. Ouch. I had to uninstall cinelerra-cv to solve a dependency issue, but I’m not actually sure what that package is. After that, and a long, long wait, I reboot the system and everything seems to be working smoothly. The only glitch so far is that my grub.conf got overwritten, so I have to recover the alternate OS boot options. Easy.
Summary: kudos to the Fedora team, this has so far been a painless upgrade. Thank you!
And, yes, I know that Fedora 11 is about to drop. While I’m frequently a bleeding-edge junkie, maintaining Linux is one place I feel more comfortable lagging a bit behind the curve!