The original fedup - 0.7 - did not work. Upgrade to 0.8 and then it complained about three packages - gthumb, picard-freeworld, and kipi-plugins. I THINK what happened is that my Fedora 19 version was the same or greater than the version in Fedora 20, but the dependencies were written in such a way as to not allow greater library versions. In other words, depends on library 1.0 and so version 1.1 doesn’t work. Sometimes that can be an important hedge against APIs changing, but often it can lead to annoying upgrades and updates. There are times where I couldn’t update a bunch of packages because of another. So I would remove that one and upgrade (or update) and later I could reinstall it. So I removed these packages and proceeded with the upgrade. It still complained about nvidia (which is really the only thing that is a problem after every upgrade)

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.

I just did a preupgrade upgrade from Fedora 13 to Fedora 14.  The only hitch is that it didn’t find enough space to download the installer ahead of time so that had to be downloaded after the the reboot.  Everything went off without a hitch.  My absolute cleanest upgrade ever.  Dual screen worked, nothing had to be uninstalled.  None of the repos had to be disabled.  All my usual programs work.  I haven’t tried Blender yet, that’s tomorrow.  The first thing I noticed was that the OpenOffice.org icons have changed again.  This is the third time, I think,since I’ve been using Linux.

So I was unable to preupgrade to Fedora 12, even after the latest update.  So I did a yum upgrade since I’ve known that to work in the past.  As always, I followed the instructions here.  It was very fast this time around compared to past upgrades.  It only took 2 hours 40 minutes.  I ended up needing to tell yum to ignore problems because of a weird package that it wanted to install, but couldn’t.  But then installed anyway.  I’m not sure what’s up with that.  The specific package was abrt.  And then when I went to install it afterwards, it said it was already installed.  Go figure!  So far there’s only one thing that annoys me since upgrading.  All my taskbar icons are much more spread out.  I tried to push them together, but I think this is as close as they get.  See the images below for a comparison.

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.

I’m not 100% sure, but I think this is the longest I’ve purposely waited to upgrade to another Fedora release. I’ve been reading the Fedora user and developer mailling lists and what’s I’ve seen there has pretty much convinced me not to upgrade. First of all, there are a lot of answers to people complaining about Fedora 9 being unstable which include variations on “no one told you to stop using Fedora 8.” Some answers put it more politely and some more bluntly. And that’s ok. Just like the people who bought the iPhone last year got their pants pulled down over the price, so do those who upgrade to distros right away pay the price in instability. This happens with all distros from Fedora to Ubuntu. Sure, there’s an alpha testing period and a beta testing period, but not everyone can take part in that. I, for example, use my Fedora computer as my main computer for everything but gaming and photography. I can’t be unable to do my banking or type stuff up or work on my animations just because I’m trying the latest bleeding edge Fedora. And there are others like me, so the distro doesn’t truly get tested until it comes out. This is the argument used by the KDE team with respect to the POS that KDE 4 is, according to others - I haven’t tried it out.

Two major Linux distributions will be making releases this month and since I use both of them, I’m pretty excited!  First up will be the Debian-derived Ubuntu. This distro has been the darling of users and Internet media alike for the past few years.  It stole the post from Mandriva, the previous Linux distro that everyone recommended to new users.  Although Mandriva was the easiest distro for new users, it also had a reputation for being so bleeding edge it was unstable.  Ubuntu, however, is very stable and tends to work on more hardware out of the “box”.  In fact, it was Ubuntu’s ability to work on laptops, long the Holy Grail of Linux distros, that led it to such prominence.  That is the main reason why I chose to install Ubuntu onto my laptop even though I’ve been a Fedora user since I first got into Linux about five years ago.  Ubuntu 4.08 aka Hardy Heron will be flapping its way to you on 24 April.

When I first started playing with Linux I had a very crappy old computer; I think it was a 286. It was painful to try and do anything in Gnome or KDE, but it ended up making a pretty good server as it was the server that ran this site until late 2005 or early 2006 (I can’t remember). Then I moved onto another machine which was slightly better, a Pentium II 400 Mhz, 128 MB RAM computer. That computer ran a little better in Gnome or KDE, but I became a huge fan of Fluxbox as it ran best and I was able to use it as my almost-primary computer. It is now Luigi, my file/print server.

It’s been a little delayed and it’s long in coming, but FreeBSD 7.0 is out now! They’ve made a LOT of updates over the 6.0 series; most importantly they’ve done a lot of work on the SMP kernel. SMP is what you use if you have more than one processor in your computer or if you have a Dual or Quard Core Processor. So they’ve made a huge step to continue FreeBSD’s place in modern hardware. The release announcement contains a lot of info and the release notes contain even more!