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.