As usual, every time I upgrade Fedora I write a blog post to preserve this knowledge for others who might run across the same problem or in case it happens to me again next year.  This time around the situation was a little less smooth than previous upgrades.  After the preupgrade was done, when I rebooted I was 2 MB short in /boot.  This shouldn’t happen to you if you started with Fedora recently, but I’ve been on the same install for two years.  In the past if the preupgrade failed, the installer would put your system back into its previous configuration and you could use it again.  This time around it didn’t do that and I no longer had a working system.  It complained that a bunch of services weren’t starting and I couldn’t get a shell, not even in single user mode.

Just used preupgrade to go from Fedora 14 to 15.  The entire process took about 3 hours.  That’s not too shabby!  In the old days of disc upgrades it had to go for days.  Yum upgrade often had to work overnight.  This one was much faster!  After the upgrade, I had to turn off my dropbox repo - apparently they don’t have a Fedora 15 repo turned on yet.  That allowed me to run yum distro-sync which bought me up to more or less at least what’s in Fedora 15.  Otherwise you’re just upgrading your packages, but you may be missing some new ones that were added in.  That’s what messed me up on the last upgrade.  I still have to work on the rpmnew thing to get my config files as close to what they should be as possible and I have to figure out if the orphan packages I have installed are programs I should get rid of to make sure they don’t potentially cause problems in the future.  KDE is working just as good as before.  GDM looks very different - very similar to Gnome 3 and Gnome Shell.  I’ll have to sneak in there later on in the week and try Gnome Shell out.  Sound works and everything else works.  (I only use an Ethernet connection so it’s not too complicated of a situation)

The Gnome panel was acting a little buggy and I was going to report that, but I decided that instead I could load up KDE.  I’d been wanting to check it out a little more ever since I took a look in October.  But I was unable to open Kontact because akonadi was being annoying.  Turns out that the version of akonadi I had installed from Fedora 13 was technically a higher version than the one with Fedora 14.  I ran most of the commands on this page after getting the link as advice from fenris in the Fedora freenode IRC room.  The most important one was the ??yum distribution-synchronization which fixed that akonadi problem.  Kontact now loads up.  It’s acting a bit funny with my gmail messages, but I’m sure that can be fixed.  So I’m going to have to get back into Gnome to see if the panels are behaving a bit better now.  After all, I ended up installing about half a gig of updates tonight as a result of the instructions on that page.  This is why, folks, everyone always recommends just going for a fresh install.  Upgrades always require a bit more work.

A few weeks ago I did an update to Fedora 11 using preupgrade.  Nothing really broke other than iPods.  My shuffle doesn’t work as well, but I’m working on fixing that.  I also think that the updates are less annoying-looking and are more informative.

[caption id=“attachment_2622” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Fedora 11 software update”] [/caption]