Fedora 20 : Upgrade from Fedora 19

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…