Fedora 9 was released this past Tuesday. The upgrade process has changed slightly, with the Fedora Project integrating a new tool called PreUpgrade.

To upgrade, make sure your system is fully updated with:

and reboot when the process has completed successfully (in case it installed a new kernel).

From here, we can install the new PreUpgrade with:

When that finishes, kick it off with:

As we proceed through the wizard, your screens will resemble:

Click Forward.

The new release will be chosen by default. Click Apply.

At this point, new packages are downloaded which may take some time. Grab some coffee while the downloads transfer.

Finished! Reboot and we will see a screen like this:

The remaining portion of the upgrade will be completed by Anaconda, which took approximately 5 hours on my system. Proceed by clicking Next.

“Upgrade an existing installation” is preselected, hit Next to continue.

Here you are prompted to upgrade the GRUB boot loader. This is the best thing to do. Click Next. The following series of screens are shown as the upgrade progresses:

Ah, here we are. We find ourselves at the final screen, indicating the success of the upgrade. Word. Reboot. And that should conclude the process.

In my opinion, this upgrade was 1000x better than the upgrade from F7 to F8. I ran into all kinds of issues then, but this was better.

Having gone through the steps now, what was your upgrade experience like?

About Benjamin Perove

Benjamin has been associated with computer technology starting from a very early age, and has contributed to the success of many businesses and enterprises since 2001.

He loves to crush pow at Keystone, play acoustic guitar, climb rocks, and ascend mountains on his road bike.

Benjamin is an Avalanche fan and currently resides in Boulder, Colorado.

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Some may find that out-of-the-box, Hardy Heron’s network performance is painfully slow. By default, IPv6 is enabled, and chances are good that your nearest router can’t speak the language nor interpret DNS requests efficiently.

To disable IPv6, open a shell and append the following to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist:

Reboot.

To verify that IPv6 is disabled, run

or

The commands shouldn’t return any information. Firefox browsing speeds should be much improved.

About Benjamin Perove

Benjamin has been associated with computer technology starting from a very early age, and has contributed to the success of many businesses and enterprises since 2001.

He loves to crush pow at Keystone, play acoustic guitar, climb rocks, and ascend mountains on his road bike.

Benjamin is an Avalanche fan and currently resides in Boulder, Colorado.

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Run once, huh? Good work, Microsoft. Way to throw more wood on the ‘annoying’ fire.

Manually add these keys:

Or execute this registry file to keep it from running indefinitely.

About Benjamin Perove

Benjamin has been associated with computer technology starting from a very early age, and has contributed to the success of many businesses and enterprises since 2001.

He loves to crush pow at Keystone, play acoustic guitar, climb rocks, and ascend mountains on his road bike.

Benjamin is an Avalanche fan and currently resides in Boulder, Colorado.

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In the past, we discussed the procedure for upgrading Fedora using yum. Ready to try it again for Werewolf?

Grab the new fedora-release and fedora-release-notes to update repos:

Now sit back, relax, and run yum -y upgrade for a couple of hours.

Actually, there was nothing relaxing about it. Yum repeatedly killed itself during the transaction test. If that happens, you might try upgrading sqlite (that’s yum -y upgrade sqlite) before all other packages.

Then I started getting memory alloc errors. I don’t exactly know how I ran out of memory, but I closed my VNC session and tried again through a remote shell. If that doesn’t work, try upgrading bits and pieces instead of everything at once. For example, upgrade perl, then rpm, then python, etc.

I also ran into problems with mismatched checksums. I didn’t want to re-download every last package AGAIN, so I removed pretty much everything in /var/cache/yum except for downloaded packages, and that took care of it. Another way: yum clean dbcache. Oh, and make sure you have a backup of your data first.

Eventually it installed 80 packages, updated 880, and removed 4. (Download size: 776 M)

Since the previous upgrade, I’ve reduced unnecessary packages, but the entire thing still sucked a lot compared to Ubuntu’s upgrade to 7.10.

If you attempted this upgrade, how did it go? Did you run into as many problems?

About Benjamin Perove

Benjamin has been associated with computer technology starting from a very early age, and has contributed to the success of many businesses and enterprises since 2001.

He loves to crush pow at Keystone, play acoustic guitar, climb rocks, and ascend mountains on his road bike.

Benjamin is an Avalanche fan and currently resides in Boulder, Colorado.

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When opening files from Word, Excel, etc. you are presented with and have to wait for a dialog that says “Initializing the Root Folders to Display.” After it finishes, browsing through items becomes painfully slow.

There is a problem with one of your mapped network drives. At least one of them is either disconnected or awaiting credentials. If you reconnect or disconnect it altogether, this problem will go away.

About Benjamin Perove

Benjamin has been associated with computer technology starting from a very early age, and has contributed to the success of many businesses and enterprises since 2001.

He loves to crush pow at Keystone, play acoustic guitar, climb rocks, and ascend mountains on his road bike.

Benjamin is an Avalanche fan and currently resides in Boulder, Colorado.

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