A new version of my favorite Linux distribution has been released recently – Fedora 8. I got my hands on the installation DVD (thanks bro!) and tried it straight away.
It didn’t go very well – the installation was hanging up during dependencies check. I thought maybe it was something simple to fix and checked it with strace, which showed that the installation was looping constantly creating some temporary files and then removing them. I tried to create these files by hand, but they were immediately removed. I asked around on #fedora IRC channel, but it was over a weekend and it was rather empty. No tips were given.
Then I came across Michael’s post that reminded me that I could do an upgrade using Yum package manager, bypassing the installation altogether.  Following the steps in the guide was simple and soon yum started downloading the new packages. But my Internet connection is pretty slow, it would have taken me about two days just to get the files.  Not much fun to wait. Instead I decided to copy files from the DVD to /var/cache/yum/fedora/packages/ directory and restart the upgrade process. Now all I needed to download were the updates that were released since the distribution went public.
A couple of hours later I rebooted into Fedora 8, running the new tick-less kernel (the biggest reason for me to upgrade). I also noticed that a few fonts packages were updated – fonts are sharper and cleaner. NetworkManager was upgraded. And a few other things improved.
I’ve heard a lot of people complaining about sound problems due to a new sound server, but I didn’t have a chance to test it yet. Other than this though everything seems to be running just fine.
My upgrade from FC3 to FC8 was much more difficult. I had the same dependencies hang, so I also tried to upgrade via yum which failed miserably on dependancies, then I upgraded to FC7 (which also initially failed, but I was able to find the reason), and then finally upgraded to Fc8.
I ended up with completely screwed up fonts, non-working KDE and non-working NX (ksycoca was segfaulting). Fonts were kind of fixed after a lot of X.org/Qt/Firefox tweaking, KDE crashes were traced to a broken .xml desktop entry, non-working NX was fixed by installing NX 3.0 from nomachine. All in all, about 20 hours worth of effort.
My hopes for a better and more reliable Evolution did not realize (Exchange plug-in still locks up), but at least I’ve got an upgraded OpenOffice. :)
hazard,
sounds like you had some fun :)
I’m trying to avoid problems like this as much as possible. Every version of the distribution brings in some changes which are easy to handle one at a time. But when a few of these come together, it usually takes more time to solve and the final result is still a messy system.
My approach to this is to upgrade at least every other time. And I try to upgrade to every version to keep it going steady, but with Fedora’s 6-9 month release cycle, I don’t always have the time.
I hope the yum upgrade process will be improved and tested more in the future. It feels better than the traditional “reboot to DVD, upgrade, reboot to the new system” way…
oh, and yes, something about the fonts was changed. Fonts look sharper and more readable, but somehow they are smaller by default. Sharper is better, of course, but I’ll have to fix the size eventually…
hazard, could you please publish some info how to fix the problem with fonts? I have probably the same problem as you after upgrade from Fedora 7 to 8, but don’t know where to look. It happened after last batch of upgraded packages which contained xorg but not qt. What is strange is that there is something wrong with kde or qt, because fvwm works fine with fonts. Thanks Michal
Try fixing Qt fonts using qtconfig-qt4 utility.
Thanks. I’ve found the problem is in driver. You can view the bug in bugzilla: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=417241