alex diavatis | December 23, 2012

Are you FedUp with Fedora 17? Upgrade to 18 ;)

This post was made with another stylesheet and it might be messed up!

fedoraFedorians have a nice sense of humor, and FedUp (FEDora UPgrader) is the new upgrading tool for Fedora 17->18 and beyond, that replaces PreUpgrader.

Earth survived from Mayan prophecy, end of days didn’t come, and Fedora 18 release will make it at Jan 8, 2013 -hopefully ;)

Fedora

In my opinion Fedora is a very promising distro, that will never fulfill the promises. It is extremely fast, extremely updated, has a nice GNOME desktop, but. I won’t discuss the issues of Fedora as they are well known through the centuries, but you might want to take a look at this thread started from Tomas Radeja (sorry to refer it again).

Personally I don’t mind if Fedora freezes sometimes or if some packages getting broken and it takes some time to get fixed (as I can downgrade them), what bothers me is that I never have managed to Upgrade Fedora to a next release without serious problems and Googling.

Other main distros  have solved this issue years ago, while Fedora seems to struggle on this area. Since Fedora is considered a Parent Distro, who distributor will use it when it carries this weakness?

The other issue with Fedora is that some updates go with limited testing in stable release and testing cycle takes places inside there. Ok, let’s use Rawhide and submit some bugs. But Rawhide gets un-bootable almost every 1 out of 4 updates. It’s a tricky situation when Fedora needs more users to test it, while more users will come only when Fedora gets better. I don’t know if Fedora has larger user-base than Arch but it certainly has larger than Mageia (at least for now). Both these distros have far better community support than Fedora.

Fedora 18

Things seem to change significantly in the latest Fedora. Fedora 18 is a huge improvement over 17 in every single area. On the other hand all Distros feel like they carry their very personal diseases for years, and they just can’t get rid of them.  I just hope that Fedora engineers (which many of them are from the best in Open Source in general) will keep up the good work they did in 18, they will keep improving 18 and they won’t abandon it and just focus in 19.

Anyway, if you are fed up with 17, give 18 a chance ;)

Upgrading from 17 to 18

There are four ways to upgrade, but I will just refer them. You should, and it is better to check on Fedora Wikis for details as they regularly update them.

1. Clean Install ;)

Never did that in Ubuntu, I always end up to this with Fedora. The preferred method of many people and the one that just works ;) If you run Fedora 18 Beta, you don’t need to do anything. Fedora will auto upgrade to stable.

2. FedUp

FedUp is the new tool and the official method to upgrade Fedora from now on. It works only for 17->18 and 18->Rawhide. Before you try it, you don’t really need to backup anything (although strongly recommended) as the worst thing can happen is to end up with an un-bootable machine. In this case, if you can’t restore it, you can use your live Image, backup your stuffs and proceed with method 1 ;)

FedUp is a terminal tool and goes like this

$ sudo fedup-cli --network 18

If that succeed you reboot and you will a new Entry in Grub Menu, for upgrading your system. If you are using a dual boot box and another Bootloader you should take a special consideration.

3. Yum Upgrade

This method is recommended to more experience users. The advantage here is that you take all the steps manually, so it is easier to discover what went wrong.. most probably something will go wrong. The idea here is that you just upgrading your Fedora 17 packages from Fedora 18 repos.

4. Fedora Upgrade Script

This is just a script that simplifies all the above process and reduces the steps with Yum Upgrade. This is not Official Approved Upgrading Method from Fedora, and is just 5 days old. The script lies on GitHub, which is down for maintenance at the moment, so I cannot read more info.

Rawhide

If you are running Rawhide and you want to downgrade to a beta or stable release you can take a look on the following links. This is not recommended and it might be easier to wipe the system and install from scratch.

In a perfect world..

..with perfect Fedora upgrades you should seen something like..

fedora-18-clean

..but we don’t live in a perfect world, do we? ;)

Fedora 18 ships GNOME 3.6, and GNOME is the first class citizen in Fedora. If you guys know some posts, articles, docs, tutorials etc, with Fedora upgrades tips please let a comment!

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  • http://www.facebook.com/sesivany Jiří Eischmann

    I’ve done upgrades F14->F15->F17->F18 on three different computers and never had a problem. When I was using Ubuntu I ended up doing a fresh installation almost after every upgrade because the system suffered from a lot of minor problems that didn’t occur in the fresh installation. I don’t have the same problem with Fedora. So my experience is quite opposite.

    • alex285

      Hey! you are Fedora developer, don’t expect other people to have the same skills as you! 9.5/10 Windows users get the same experience from Windows, 7/10 Ubuntu users get the same experience from Ubuntu, 7/10 Fedora users get a different experience from their Fedora. These are just random numbers, but it goes something like this.

      • http://www.facebook.com/sesivany Jiří Eischmann

        Well, I can be more involved in development of Fedora than an average user, but during upgrades, I’ve never done anything more than what normal users do. I just started PreUpgrade/FedUp and let it do the job. No custom actions before or after. I’m not saying that upgrades in Fedora are perfect, no upgrades are perfect because there are thousands of things that can break. I’m just saying that in my experience Fedora upgrades are not worse than in other distributions. And simply theoretically, they should be more reliable than the Ubuntu ones because they’re run in minimal environment while Ubuntu upgrades in a fully running system.

        • alex285

          Having smooth upgrades from 14->18 is something encouraging but you can’t say that is the rule. Users (any kind of users) of every open source system today (Ubuntu, Android, Chrome, Firefox, Fedora etc – there is a strong competition) can’t tolerate any (small or big) upgrade failures (both in whole system or in packages).
          I wish you guys the best with all the new things you make, and I wish you the best twice since I am a happy/unhappy Fedora user ;)

  • Name

    Will it realy update from beta to stable just like that? Without any my afford?

    • alex285

      yes, since you have a beta, you don’t need to take further steps. You’re just updating packages. 99% sure ;)

  • http://profiles.google.com/bwat47 Brandon Watkins

    Personally I recommend staying away from gnome 3.6 at the moment due to this ridiciulous memory leak that is still unfixed: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=685513

    • alex285

      Thanks for posting this bug, I was looking for it 2-3 days ago to see its state.

  • Leslie Satenstein

    I have been testing Fedora 18 since Nov 8th. With the provided application programs, I have to say that they are bugfree and provide good performance. I generally do not perform upgrades and do not intend to do so using Fedup. My reasoning is as follows:
    I do install many applications to evaluate them. These applications bring in dependencies, and in some cases, use preexisting libraries. But when trying to remove an application that I felt had no purpose, yum wants to remove all dependencies, including libraries required by other applications.
    So… Every six months I backup my /home, I backup some archived stuff, and I perform a clean installation. I then restore my /home, taking only the non-hidden files.

  • Arek

    I could not get Fedora 18 to successfully boot from DVD or USB install. It crashed part of the way through installation on UEFI even with UEFI secure boot disabled. The way I upgraded successfully to Fedora 18 Beta was install Fedora 17 and than once logged into Fedora 17 I used yum to upgrade to Fedora 18 without any problems at all.

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  • Phil Dobbin

    I’ve used preupgrade since 12 & my desktop machine is on 17. Never had a problem. I’m running RC3 in a VM with a CentOS host & also headless on a HP server & they’re both stable as far as I can see. I suggest backing up /home, /etc & whatever else you need (I used to use Mondo but it hasn’t worked since 17) & trying fedup. If that doesn’t work, wipe, install & restore…

  • http://twitter.com/pahnin phanindra

    Fedup says iso is invalid!! I just downloaded the image from fedora site

    • Alan Pinnt

      Try using the network option.

      sudo fedup –network 18 –debuglog feduplog.log

      • http://twitter.com/pahnin phanindra

        I tried that it said some repositary problem so I upgraded with yum

  • Craig Wessel

    Fedora has provided a nice clean stable distro with the rock solid, feature rich, application rich Gnome 3… I don’t see why so many people have issues with Fedup. It’s the only recommended way to upgrade. It works for me and I had a kernel update recently that erased the F17 remnants. With python 3 out of the box you have rock solid programming. GNOME 3 is much more stable than Unity and that’s because Gnome is developed by a professional company. Unity is written in peoples free time, thus making it unstable. I run GNOME 3 on Ubuntu to avoid the Unity mess. And I also run Fedora on my main box. Ubuntu LTS with GNOME 3.4 is on an older box.