I upgraded Fedora 12 to Fedora 14 over the weekend using PreUpgrade for the first time. (I tried a direct yum distro-sync upgrade first but it got stuck in infinite dependency loops.)
Overall I was impressed with the download size reduction and the install speed after rebooting the system for the anaconda installer to apply the new packages. I liked the reduction in system downtime resulting from downloading all the packages before the reboot and the smaller set of packages that were installed.
Some extra steps I had to deal with:
- There are a couple bugs in the version of PreUpgrade that is part of Fedora 12. This post on The Wily Blog contains the fixes to the preupgrade-cli script needed for it to run.
- preupgrade-cli needed /etc/sysconfig/i18n to exist but it was missing on my system. I created the file with the default values from the Fedora docs to get past this issue.
It also seemed like the install asked a few redundant questions it could have figured out before the reboot to start the install:
- The installer asked whether to do a fresh install or an upgrade, where a PreUpgrade is obviously an upgrade.
- The installer asked which filesystem’s installation to upgrade (there was only one on the system), and then again asked which filesystem to add to the “upgrade” list. I believe it could have assumed the same filesystem for both questions, and even possibly set default values for all of them based on the filesystems in use when PreUpgrade was run before the reboot.
- The installer asked which interface provided the internet connection for downloading additional packages and images, which PreUpgrade could have figured out before the reboot and passed it along.
This upgrade was the most painless Fedora or Red Hat upgrade I’ve done in years! Almost all of my services worked afterward with no reconfiguration. A big thanks and hats off the the Fedora team for PreUpgrade!