Fedora 8

[Tsuroerusu]

Just to piss off hellonorman (I'm kidding man!), I would just like to say that Fedora 8 is a nice little distro.

On a serious note, I have upgraded both my desktop and laptop with very few problems. I had a few issues with this PulseAudio sound server that they're now using, but I did manage to get it to behave, so that's good. Also, suspend and hibernation now work on my laptop! YAY!!!
Since they're including the ath5k driver, my internal Atheros wireless card now works, and without any blobs! I love it. The new IcedTea JDK is great because Azureus runs well enough under it (And I have submitted bug reports) that I don't need Sun's proprietary Java 1.5, which is great, one less proprietary component on my system!
Artwork is really slick as usual, there's THREE new official versions of Fedora, one full of developer stuff, one full of electrical engineering stuff, and a whole DVD chock full of games.

GREAT release from the Fedora Project, definitely go at least try the LiveCD, I think it's really cool!

[riddlebox]

I like it too, when you say you upgraded, do you mean change the sources in your yum config to 8 then do a yum upgrade? Or do you do a clean install? I would rather do upgrades kind of like the Debian/Ubuntu way, I hate installing new....

[jturning]

Yes, do tell. How did you upgrade. I have Fedora 7 working so well on my laptop right now I need affirmation to upgrade, .

Bugz

[Tsuroerusu]

I like it too, when you say you upgraded, do you mean change the sources in your yum config to 8 then do a yum upgrade? Or do you do a clean install? I would rather do upgrades kind of like the Debian/Ubuntu way, I hate installing new....

I have my partitions laid out like this:

/ - 10 GB
swap - 1 GB
/stuff - Rest of drive
/home - All on a separate drive

So what I do is that I boot the installation media, tell it to wipe out /, and simply mount the rest of the partitions like they previously was. Then when the installation is done, and the firstboot wizard comes up, I simply recreate my old user, log in and I'm back at where I was. Then I just add the Livna repository and spend like 10 mins. on reinstalling a few codecs and such (No proprietary ones).

I personally don't trust "upgrades", because I want to spend like one hour on this process and just have it be working, I don't want to be using my system, and then suddenly run into problems, I just can't stand that.
I have read about people who've used YUM to upgrade[1], and apparently it can be done, but it's not what I prefer to do.

The official Fedora way of actually "upgrading", is by either using the install media and doing an "upgrade", or doing the same using a network installation.
For Fedora 9 they're looking to make a process where you run a program that downloads a new kernel along with the installer, modifies your grub config, then you reboot, select the new option, and then the installer runs off your hard drive like it was the install media, and then you do the upgrade like you historically would have done (The packages gets downloaded off the net).

[1] http://fedora-tutorials.com/2007/11/10/ ... asy-steps/

Yes, do tell. How did you upgrade. I have Fedora 7 working so well on my laptop right now I need affirmation to upgrade, .

Bugz

If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

I upgraded right away because there were features of Fedora 8 that I wanted to use, for my laptop the new suspend/hibernation support was a must, and for both machines, I wanted the new completely free software JDK called IcedTea.

[snarkout]

Most people would consider that a reinstall. To be frank, in this day and age, with cheap RAID and backup options, my system is often more important to me than my data, which (***crosses fingers***) is usually backed up somewhere. Reinstalling an entire system and getting it back to the point that I prefer is a major chore.

On sort of a side note, it would be nice if someone would invent a utility that dependably took a package dump from rpm or apt-get and ran through that list on a new install to get everything installed again. Anyone know of an app or trick to do this?

[rehcla]

Hi all!

I have upgraded too and no problems until now!
Just the atheros device is not working with the new ath5k driver, but maybe this will be fixed by an update!
When I install the madwifi-module, the wlan device works fine...
So I am happy with F8:)

Claus

[allix]

Most people would consider that a reinstall.

Indeed, on my desktop i installed debian testing sometime last year before it became etch since then i upgraded to testing/lenny by changing the /etc/apt/sources.list then ran apt-get dist-upgrade.

I have all sorts of applications installed , the layout has been changed to the way i like it. Its just too much hassle to do a reinstall.

To me it seems Troels does not trust yum update which is a real shame.
I might upgrade my laptop to 8 or just wait till 9 as i heard you can skip releases when upgrading.

[Tsuroerusu]

To me it seems Troels does not trust yum update which is a real shame.

Well, there's no reason for me to trust it. I have seen people having problems with that sort of upgrade path. Trust is earned, it is never claimed. Ever since I began using GNU/Linux, whenever I have done a "reinstall", it has always worked, and worked well, I have never run into problems caused by what was there before.

And I don't mess with my system so much that I need to redo a lot of configuration, when upgrading to a new version through a "reinstall" (I consider it an upgrade, because of the way I do it).

It's simple: Format the root partition during the installation, recreate the non-root user using the firstboot wizard, and log in! Couldn't be simpler in my opinion. I can see the problems if you're running an heavily configured server, software RAID array, LVM or something, or have configured your system in a fairly complex way that you would then need to redo. Other than that, I don't understand the disgust for an upgrade the way I do it that many people seem to have, especially when some of those same people have problems using a package manager to upgrade.

[snarkout]

Because reinstalling every package you have ever installed is a PITA?

[Tsuroerusu]

Because reinstalling every package you have ever installed is a PITA?

Then you must be installing a gigantic amount of stuff, it took me 15 mins. in total, which includes the time it took to download the packages.
This included some KDE applications, lots of codecs, Azureus and stuff. I didn't even exit the package manager once, before I was done.

[Gomer_X]

To me it seems Troels does not trust yum update which is a real shame.

Well, there's no reason for me to trust it. I have seen people having problems with that sort of upgrade path. Trust is earned, it is never claimed.

Although YUM can upgrade a system, it's not designed for it (that's what anaconda is for). This type of upgrade has never, ever (ever) been supported. They used to even refuse to tell you how to do it. People have been complaining about this since Core 2, but that's just the way it is. It's not a developer priority. If people want rolling upgrades, they should use Debian.

Just popping in the first install CD and rebooting works just fine (most of the time), though. I've done fresh installs and I've done upgrades (the right way), and have always found fresh installs to work a little better. Upgrades just upgrade the existing packages, so you miss things you might get with a fresh install.

Upgrading from Fedora Core 6 to 7 thoroughly broke my desktop system (it could no longer find RPM), so I did a fresh install instead (preserving my /home of course). I log everything I do as root, so by now I have a pretty good list of what I need to do to customize a fresh install the way I like.

I upgraded a server from Core 1 all the way through Core 4 and never had the slightest problem. Just go into /etc an look for config files with .rpmnew on the end and merge the changes into the old configs, and I was done. That system has never had X installed, though.

I'm not quite ready for Fedora 8, though. I usually give it a month to shake out bugs before I upgrade.

[Tsuroerusu]

To me it seems Troels does not trust yum update which is a real shame.

Well, there's no reason for me to trust it. I have seen people having problems with that sort of upgrade path. Trust is earned, it is never claimed.

Although YUM can upgrade a system, it's not designed for it (that's what anaconda is for). This type of upgrade has never, ever (ever) been supported. They used to even refuse to tell you how to do it. People have been complaining about this since Core 2, but that's just the way it is. It's not a developer priority. If people want rolling upgrades, they should use Debian.

Excellent explanation, thank you very much Gomer_X. Yeah I've been reading some blog posts and I do see some people who've used YUM to upgrade and it worked fine, but like you said, it's not a supported way of upgrading, and that's kind of what puts me off.

I'm not quite ready for Fedora 8, though. I usually give it a month to shake out bugs before I upgrade.

I hear what you're saying, although Fedora 8 has seemed extremely solid so far.

[davijordan]

I just did an online upgrade from fedora six to fedora eight per howtoforge (the instructions were for 7 to 8, but then I never follow directions). I am not sure I like it yet, but it seems to be a wee bit faster. It lost my extra themes for samegnome. Oh well I will find them again. Other things started working that did not work before. After I play with it for a week, we will see..

[jsusanka]

I had to get creative. Fedora 8 would hang on my laptop at install time and so I could not get it installed. so I followed the steps below and it worked like a champ. I also did this on another upgrade like core 3 to core 4 or something and it worked fine. It is nice to have this info in a pinch like my situation when I could not get an install to go on the laptop. Not sure what it was the cd's checked out fine and installed on another box just fine and I tried using a couple of boot parameters like noapm or acpi=off with no luck. do like fedora 8 - it is one of their better distributions IMO. Just substitue fedora core 1 with fedora 7 and fedora core 2 with fedora 8 below. or any version that you are upgrading to and from. the mirrors may also be different so you may have to look them up beforehand.

Here are the steps I used to upgrade a system from Fedora Core 1 to Fedora Core 2:

1. Install the Fedora Core 2 version of yum and fedora-release:
rpm -Uvh ftp://ftp.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/fedora/lin ... noarch.rpm ftp://ftp.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/fedora/lin ... 4.i386.rpm

2. If yum was already installed prior to the upgrade, backup your old /etc/yum.conf file and replace /etc/yum.conf with /etc/yum.conf.rpmnew.

mv /etc/yum.conf /etc/yum.conf.`date +%m.%d.%y` mv /etc/yum.conf.rpmnew /etc/yum.conf

3. Edit /etc/yum.conf. Choose a mirror from http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors.html to the [base] and [updates-released] sections.

Original [base] and [updates-released] sections:

[base]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Base
baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/f ... search/os/

[updates-released]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Released Updates
baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/f ... $basearch/

New [base] and [updates-released] sections:

[base]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Base
baseurl=ftp://ftp.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/fedora/lin ... search/os/
#baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/f ... search/os/

[updates-released]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Released Updates
baseurl=ftp://ftp.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/fedora/lin ... $basearch/
#baseurl=http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/f ... $basearch/

3. Upgrade to Fedora Core 2.
yum upgrade