Upgrading to Fedora 10

By EricMesa

January 6, 2009 - 4 minutes read - 710 words

Now that I have “I’m Not Mad” caught up for the next month, I thought it was an OK time to upgrade to Fedora 10. Unlike with the Fedora 9 release, there haven’t been huge complaints of the upgrade causing the system to become unusable. (Most, though not all, of that came from the version of X.org that Fedora 9 used)

As usual, I followed instructions at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq and I started the yum upgrade command at 1852. KDE basket-contact gave me dependency errors so I had to uninstall it. It had been giving me problems with updates as well - I had just forgotten about it. 1854 - started upgrade again. This time a problem with gstreamer - I think gstreamer gives me problems every upgrade. So I remove gstreamer08-plugins. (Which was apparently hanging around from fedora 6). This also got rid of some more gstreamers packages hanging around from Fedora 5. Don’t know why I still had that kruft there, but it’s gone now… 1859 - started yum upgrade again. This time it works! 2.8 GB! Well, it’s certainly the least painful yum upgrade process I’ve gone through yet - at least from this point in the process. The download process seems to be moving along pretty quickly. I guess getting that “fastest mirror” package out with Fedora 9 really does find the fastest mirror. Also, this far out from the Fedora 10 release, there shouldn’t be too many people hogging up the mirrors. What am I looking forward to in Fedora 10? Oddly, not much. Compared to previous releases, there isn’t any one technology I’m very excited about for Fedora 10. Sure, it’ll be nice to have the latest Gnome, but that release is so incremental, I doubt I’ll notice much. The latest KDE MIGHT be enough to finally get me back to KDE. KDE 4.1 was good, but not good enough. Other than that it’ll just be nice to have the latest stuff. Something I can do every 6 months or so with Linux and only every five or more years with Windows.

Sometime between 2230 and 0630 the next day, the yum upgrade was complete. Very fast! Previous upgrades have taken around 24 hours or more! Then I did the group updates. And rebooted. I don’t have an ATI card so my boot screen is now a blue bar being chased by a light blue bar being chased by a white bar. Not quite as impressive as previous versions. And…I appear to no longer have a graphical desktop…I just have a blinking line instead of GDM.

I checked around on the net for help and found this page. After checking my Xorg logs (as I would have done if I didn’t have to high-tail it to work), I found out that my graphics card was only supported with the legacy nVidia drivers. So I had to remove the 177 drivers and go to the 173 drivers. After this…success! I had GDM once again. OOh, and the fading in of the screen was a nice touch!

Well, upon first boot into Xfce (my default desktop for the past several months) nothing appeared to be different. I launched Evolution and Rhythmbox as usual. Evolution brought up a migration wizard since they have now moved to sqlite for email. (From w/e it was before) Rhythmbox looked slightly different on the left-hand-size. I think they changed the shading a bit on the headings (library, stores, playlists, etc), but other than that it appeared to be roughly the same. The burn icon looks a little different. Sound works. I then opened up Pidgin as usual. Finally, I started up Liferea. And that worked well.

Now to test the two programs I need for " I’m Not Mad". Inkscape started up just fine. So did Blender. I am happy.

So, there you go. An upgrade working as it should. Sure, there were some small niggles to fix, but overall it’s not the nightmare it used to be. I think if the Fedora team continues to work on this, we could see Fedora become on par with Debian/Ubuntu when it comes to upgrades. So, if you have Fedora 9, it looks like a yum upgrade to Fedora 10 could be an easy task.