Fedora 15 upgrade

So I upgraded my Fedora 14 workstation to Fedora 15 last night using the yum update method (I’ve used preupgrade a few times and it’s worked on some and botched on others (mostly due to not enough space on /boot)). Since with other distros I’ve either used apt to do a dist-ugprade or the urpmi equivalent, this is somewhat my preferred upgrade path. I’ve done it before and it worked amazingly well, so I did it again last night using these great instructions: Upgrading Fedora using yum.

The only gotchya is that due to the replacement of init by systemd, when it came time to reboot, halt/reboot/etc were unable to send the correct signals to something that would shut the machine down, so I had to do a hard reboot (which never plays nice with my RAID arrays, but upon reboot there was no RAID re-sync which is either cool or scary, I’m not yet sure which). So that was a bit nerve-wracking. Otherwise it was just a lengthy process with yum telling me I had 2850 packages to deal with (including installing and removing). Instructions are good and clear. Highly recommended if you’re even moderately technically inclined.

Now I get a good look at GNOME3, which doesn’t work in my Fedora 15 vm’s (well, it works, but it looks a lot like GNOME2 due to the “poor” video support in a vm). I’m not sure what the big deal is… it’s a little wonky and takes some getting used to. I dislike that conky doesn’t show up on the desktop, but so far that’s my only real complaint. I had icons for Komodo and CrashPlan on the desktop that are no longer visible, so had to use alacarte (“yum install alacarte; alacarte”) to create new icons to go into the GNOME menu system. Then I could add them to my favourites and was off and running. It was about 1am when I finished so I haven’t had too much time to play with it yet (although I also installed LXDE to give it a go as well, in case I didn’t like GNOME3). So far I don’t mind it though.

Everything else seemed to work out of the box other than my apache configuration file. I have a few includes in /etc/httpd/conf/vhosts.d/*.conf and they weren’t loading, so I think the handling of virtual hosts has changed because once I removed the default virtualhost definition (““) that I had defined, the virtual hosts worked again.

All in all, I’m pleased. I’ve played with F15 in my vm’s since it came out (but mostly for testing security issues, etc.) so this is the first workstation with “stuff” that I’ve upgraded. So one work vm and one laptop to go and then F14 is history. Good job on this release, Fedora Folks!