It’s a little over a month since Fedora 20 was released, but during a terrible bout of insomnia last night I decided to upgrade my desktop PC.
The upgrades using “fedup” worked fine for the previous releases (Fedora 18, Fedora 19). Unfortunately, it failed abysmally for the upgrade to Fedora 20. I tried a few times, but I was not able to troubleshoot it, so I gave up and did a reinstall.
I’ve got an SSD for the system drive, but keep almost everything of importance on a second drive (and a backup drive). I tend to do most things in VMs, so I ended up doing the following:
- Backup.
- Copy a few config files to the second drive (smb.conf, hosts, fstab etc).
- Clean installation on the SSD, not touching the second drive.
- Put the mount information back into the “/etc/fstab” and mount the second drive.
- Put the “/etc/hosts” file back in place and install dnsmasq.
- Put the “smb.conf” file back in place and start samba.
- Do a “yum update -y” and reboot.
- Install some utilities, like UltraEdit, VirtualBox, DropBox and Chrome etc.
- Open up the existing VMs on the second drive using the newly installed VirtualBox.
- Backup.
That was pretty much it really. I’m, back up and running with a clean OS installation and I guess it took less than an hour from start to finish. I think in future I’ll avoid upgrades. There’s something nice about a sparkly new installation, without any of the old crap left hanging around.
During the installation, I picked MATE as my desktop. I’ve tried the others and this is the one that feels the most natural to me.
Cheers
Tim…
RT @oraclebase: Fedora 20 : Upgrade from Fedora 19 | The ORACLE-BASE Blog http://t.co/hhbIjjpObz
Hi Tim,
I wonder about your problem with fedup…I had no issue upgrading several machines with Fedora 19 to 20. But only after I realized that fedup shipped with F19 needs to be upgraded before upgrading from F19 to 20.
I first run:
$ sudo yum –enablerepo=updates-testing update fedup
and then actual update run smoothly:
$ sudo fedup –network 20
Regards,
Ales
Ales : Yes. I did that. I basically followed the same method I used for the previous two upgrades, shown here:
https://oracle-base.com/blog/2013/01/17/fedora-18-upgrading-from-fedora-17/
I think I prefer the clean installs and because of the way I work it is very easy, so I’m not sure I will bother with another upgrade. 🙂
Cheers
Tim…
Thanks 🙂