Since I don’t have any animation needing to be rendered for a few months, I decided it was a great time to upgrade Dr Queue to the latest version.  I’d heard that a lot of improvements had been added since version 0.60.  So let’s see how the upgrade process goes:

On Mario, my Fedora 8 machine, I had to install scons first as it’s now used to buld dr queue.  I also had to build it on my FreeBSD machines, starting with KingKoopa, the render master.  This also required python to be installed.  For Mario, it was very easy, I just ran the install script and it wrote over the old stuff and appears to work.  I’ll probably need to copy the new directories over to the common hard drive.  Peach and BulletBill already had python installed so they didn’t need scons installed.

I had to uninstall a few more multimedia packages, but it eventually upgraded. After rebooting I arrived at GDM just fine - yay! I’m not sure if it’s just me, but the bootup time on Fedora 8 seems to a A LOT faster than it was in Fedora 7. I feel like I got to GDM a lot faster.

Compiz is working and so is dual screen - so far this live upgrade has been better than any of my DVD/CD upgrades. Due to either updates in Compiz or in Gnome or in Fedora’s changes to Gnome, I finally have something I’ve wanted since Fedora Core 6 - on the desktop switcher, when using Compiz, it would not show the dividers between the desktops. Now it does show the dividers, making for a better experience. It’s easier to click on the exact desktop I want. Then again, at least on this first boot, I seem to be missing the top-most bar on my program - where the max, min and close program button are. Not surprisingly, there are no updates to install.

Mario is my main Linux box. I had to uninstall x264 this comes from the fact that I mixed livna and freshrpms. I never intended to do so, but I started with freshrpms back in the day, but nowadays I use livna for my graphics card. That plus freshrpms relative lack of updates compared to livna means that it’s slowly sliding off my computer. The only bad thing is that livna does not carry binaries for Cinelerra. I’ll have to investigate what I should do there. So far, for dependency errors I’ve had to remove:

I followed the procedure at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq so the point of this is just to go over my experience with these steps.

1. Review and remove all .rpmsave and .rpmnew files before and after upgrading I basically did a locate, found them and deleted them.

2. for a in $(find /etc /var -name ‘*.rpm?*’); do b=${a%.rpm?*}; diff -u $a $b; done I did this, but I didn’t really know what to do with the results. It appears not to have mattered in this case

Well, at least it worked pretty well on my future PVR. I will give a more detailed explanation/directions of my experience for others who may be wondering if this is really as scary as it sounds since it’s “unsupported”. However, my main Linux computer is much, much more complex in the number of packages installed. I’ll probably be waiting until after the Thanksgiving Holidays to tackle that one to make sure that I have the needed time to fix things if they go wrong. At least I’m happy at the prospect and I plan on letting the Fedora Live Upgrade SIG know about this so they can make it officially supported.

Well, the entire upgrade process is not yet over, so I don’t want to get too excited, but I think this may solve my problem.  I started a yum upgrade on my living room computer  - which will one day be my MythTv PVR (once I get the necessary hardware).  It went through the dependency check in roughly 4 minutes or less.  It’s now downloading 951 MB of updates, so it may be a while before it’s ready for the next phase.  Still, if this works, I know what I’m going to do with my main computer.  I really hope this can eventually become a supported method of upgrading.  It seems to be a lot faster and doesn’t require me to uninstall all of my third party programs.

It may have been about to install or it may never have installed, but after 35 hours, I was getting a little annoyed.  I’ve decided to try the unsupported yum upgrade.  I’ll try it first one a guinea pig computer that’s at Fedora 7.  If that works, I’ll try it on my real machine.

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Tags: [Fedora 8](http://technorati.com/tag/Fedora 8), upgrade, yum

It’s still right at the end of that little progress bar. The HDD activity light on my compute continues so I’m hoping it’s not frozen, but just working on figuring out the dependencies on all of my packages. I’m going to give it until I get home today and maybe until I go to bed. After that I’ll have to rethink things - perhaps uninstalling those non-Fedora packages…. q:o(

Upgrading to Fedora 7 didn’t take this long and neither did Fedora 6, but that’s ok - as long as it happens.  It’s nearly done with the dependency checking.  It’s been getting closer and closer to the end of the bar.  Part of me thinks it may be stuck, but after waiting 10 hours to get this far, I don’t want to stop if there’s a chance it will start installing tonight or even tomorrow morning.  Before the next upgrade I hope to have more RAM, as I think that’s probably part of the reason why it’s taking so long.  Just wanted to update how long it’s taking both for anyone else in this situation and for myself so when Fedora 9 comes out, I can remember how long Fedora 8 took.

I tried upgrading Fedora 7 to Fedora 8 a few times when it first came out and it kept getting stuck at 26% in the dependency checking phase. I went on the fedora IRC room and I was told to remove my non-Fedora repos. I didn’t listen because that’s always the first thing they tell you to do and, in my experience, it never seems to be the true culprit. Then I found out online that the update servers were swamped when Fedora 8 first came out. Also, freshrpms didn’t appear to have any RPMs yet for Feodra 8. Tried it again today and it appears to be going much better. It’s taken around 2.5 hours, but the dependency check is almost done. I’m hoping to be able to upgrade today. This last part has been especially slow, so I’m hoping that within the next hour or two I’ll be able to start the actual upgrade process. I’ll post what happens here in case others are having similar problems.