Month: December 2013

Upgrading to Fedora 20

Well, last night I spent a bit more time than I expected trying to upgrade to Fedora 20.   The standard recommended way is:

yum install fedup
fedup --network 20

I tried that and it seemed to be working OK.  My laptop spent a while downloading all updated packages and then told me that everything is prepared for the upgrade process – all I needed to do was a reboot.   And so I did.  When booting up, a new Grub menu item showed up – “System upgrade (fedup)“.  I chose that one and the system started booting.  After a few screens of messages, which flew by too fast (but I haven’t noticed anything wrong in there), the system rebooted again.  Now, the fedup menu item was gone from Grub and the system booted back into Fedora 19.

After searching around for a bit, I realized that there was a problem with fedup-0.7 and that I could either upgrade it from a testing repository to fedup-0.8, or I could go with the good old yum-based upgrade.  Since I always seem to have troubles with fedup, I decided to opt for the yum way.  Here is all I had to do:

# You can pick any other Fedora 20 mirror here
rpm -Uvh http://mirror.easyspeedy.com/fedora/releases/20/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/f/fedora-release-20-1.noarch.rpm
yum update --skip-broken

That meant that all the packages had to be downloaded again – there is probably a way to move them from the fedup folders to yum, but I didn’t care enough to find out.  But once the yum was finished and I rebooted – all was done.  The system is up and running and so far everything is good.

Stealing Mona Lisa

Stealing Mona Lisa

mona lisa gone

As he entered the Salon Carré, the thief headed straight for the Mona Lisa. Lifting down the painting and carrying it into an enclosed stairwell nearby was no easy job. The painting itself weighs approximately 18 pounds, since Leonardo painted it not on canvas but on three slabs of wood, a fairly common practice during the Renaissance. A few months earlier, the museum’s directors had taken steps to physically protect the Mona Lisa by reinforcing it with a massive wooden brace and placing it inside a glass-fronted box, adding 150 pounds to its weight. The decorative Renaissance frame brought the total to nearly 200 pounds. However, only four sturdy hooks held it there, no more securely than if it had been hung in the house of a bourgeois Parisian. Museum officials would later explain that the paintings were fastened to the wall in this way to make it easy for guards to remove them in case of fire.