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.

Ok, I noticed that most complaints on the Fedora mailing list seemed to have been solved and it has bene a few months since Fedora 9 came out. So I figure that it’s time to finally upgrade. Also, my biggest problems appear to have been resolved. Although X.org is still in beta, nvidia has released drivers that will work in the interim. And today KDE 4.1 was released! I expect it’ll be in Fedora any day now. I was going to wait until it was there so I wouldn’t have to download all the KDE packages twice, but I figure it’s not that big a deal.

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