I’m FedUp with Fedora!
Sorry, couldn’t resist. =)
So normally I do my updates from one version of Fedora to the next using yum, in particular the Upgrading Fedora using yum guide. Usually it works pretty good. I didn’t really have much good experience with PreUpgrade the few times I tried it, so I wanted to give FedUp a try.
In my Parallels Fedora 17 VM it worked amazingly well. So decided to try it on my laptop, which is also running Fedora 17. I think it makes sense to do a little bit of house-keeping before running it though, and the FedUp page doesn’t mention any of this (perhaps it’s no longer needed?). Anyways, a few steps:
* yum install rpmconf; rpmconf -a (review any .rpmnew/.rpmsave files, merge changes as required)
* find /etc /var -name '*?.rpm?*' (find any other old .rpmnew/.rpmsave files)
* yum install yum-utils; package-cleanup --leaves (review and remove any unused packages, not all will be removable)
* package-cleanup --orphans (find and remove any orphan packages no longer in the repositories)
Now you can run FedUp:
* yum install fedup
* fedup-cli --network 18 --debuglog /root/fedupdebug.log
If this completes without error (check the log), you can reboot. At grub you’ll see a “System Upgrade” entry. When that’s done, it’ll reboot into Fedora 18.
The wiki page talks about upgrading GRUB2 since you’ll be booting from Fedora 17′s GRUB2. If you’ve got a BIOS-based system, you can use the Updating GRUB2 configuration on BIOS systems instructions. For those using UEFI, instructions are on the same page.
You may also want to run package-cleanup --orphans after you do the upgrade as well, just to get rid of any other leftovers. The only issue I discovered so far with the upgrade is that Google Chrome didn’t work out-of-the-box. However, doing a yum remove google-chrome-stable; yum install google-chrome got that sorted out (although it did install the unstable version; the stable version had issues with missing libraries and wouldn’t load).
All in all, upgrading from Fedora 17 to 18 went a heck of a lot smoother than a fresh install did. I also got to see what the new GDM/GNOME looks like (quite nice, actually, although I think I’ll give MATE a try on the laptop as well because, while GNOME3 is pretty, I definitely preferred GNOME2).
Good job, Fedora-folks! Now I just have to upgrade my main workstation, but I think I’m going to play on the laptop for a bit before taking that step. Just in case I find any other gotchya’s.
Gianfranco
Hi, nice post, thanks.
Feb 03, 2013 @ 13:38:39I’m still thinking if to upgrade to F18 from F17, in the net there are complaints about the new release, too.
If you like Gnome2, I suggest you to have a look to Cinnamon. I use it in my laptop and I’m really happy.
Have fun with the Spherical Cow!
vdanen
I’ve tried MATE (which looks very much like GNOME2). Cinnamon is another one? I’ll have to try it out. Oooo.. on a quick read, it sounds like Cinnamon might be quite nice. Ok, going to install that shortly.
The only issues I’ve had with the new version of Fedora are install-related (which I’ve detailed in another post). Once I’ve actually got Fedora installed (or upgraded, as I did on my laptop last night), I really like it.
Feb 03, 2013 @ 13:59:55Neil Darlow
A little correction. package-cleanup is located within yum-utils and is not a package by itself.
Feb 03, 2013 @ 14:41:01vdanen
Ahh, thank you, Neil. I’ve fixed that.
Feb 03, 2013 @ 14:48:29Samson
google-chrome missing libs. Please link /lib/libusb1.xx to the chrome directory /opt/google/chrome as libusb0.xx. This is also done by the unstable ver.
packagle-cleanup is not enough. Please run rpm -qa dump and sort the output and verify with the comps.xml groups file. I was able to remove another 200 mb of cruft.
Feb 04, 2013 @ 08:35:45vdanen
The libusb1 lib wasn’t my issue… was libudev I believe. I suppose once that was satisfied, perhaps libusb1 would have been the next to fix. Installing the unstable version was much easier to fix.
The rpm -qa comparison to comps.xml sounds like an awful lot of effort for a measly 200MB tho… not sure I want to spend my time doing that. =)
Feb 04, 2013 @ 09:35:22Samson
Yeah could have been libudev0 vs. Libudev1 proceed the same, as I wrote out of my mind right now. The rpm -qa is an automate process that can easily be diff’ed
rpm -qa > log1.txt
yum group install gnome-desktop –installroot=whatever –releasever=18 –downloadonly &> log2.txt
Abort the yum process once it ran through all resolving (no need to dl anything). Delete all versioning+rpm ending (keep basenames) of both log files abd then diff. -ruN log1 log2 > log3
Of course you need to fiddle around add groups remove groups etc. but the results are great.
Feb 04, 2013 @ 11:02:32Evzen
Hi
I would suggest you could try instead Fedora’s fork Fuduntu which has Gnome 2.3 as desktop.
Feb 05, 2013 @ 05:39:25Links 5/1/2013: Hewlett-Packard GNU/Linux Laptop, Linux Mint Codename | Techrights
[...] I’m FedUp with Fedora! [...]
Feb 05, 2013 @ 18:58:20vdanen
Why would I want to use Fuduntu? I’ve never heard of it before, but if I wanted the GNOME2 desktop, I could use MATE on Fedora (seems pretty decent), but I’m really liking Cinnamon. So I’ll stick with Fedora and Cinnamon. Thanks for the suggestion though.
As an aside, switching to a different distro really isn’t something I’m terribly interested in doing. I’d rather use MATE (fork of GNOME2) than the fork of an entire OS that I enjoy. =)
Feb 05, 2013 @ 23:37:57svalli
I just bit the bullet and used fedup (far too appropriate a name!) in an attempt to go from FC17 to FC18. After it was through I have no system console — the screen is black and unresponsive. I can get in through ssh and found iptables no longer worked, apache no longer works and who knows what else no longer works. I’ve managed to get iptables running, but so many apache modules either no longer exist or are using missing symbols that it simply refuses to run. So far, for me, Fedora has a 100% failure rate in upgrades. I’ve *ALWAYS* been forced to make a backup, wipe the drive, install the new version from scratch, then recreate/configure all of the servers/databases I need. When that’s finally needed this time, Fedora will be gone forever.
Apr 25, 2013 @ 13:39:05Vincent
@svalli: ouch! That doesn’t sound good at all. Did you just run fedup without any preparation, as indicated in the original post? (Perhaps you were unaware and/or found this posting after the fact). I don’t understand why it would be so difficult for you (the 100% failure rate in upgrades is odd… one of my systems has been upgraded every version since Fedora 12 I believe). It is definitely a shame, and I can see why you’re a little soured on Fedora as a result. =(
Apr 26, 2013 @ 08:20:24