Upgrading to Fedora 12

...was pain-free. Well, almost.

The prep work for Fedora's latest version, Constantine, involved backing up important files and freeing up space. Like my move from Fedora 10 to 11, I used PreUpgrade (I' didn't want to do the yum upgrade route -- it was too much work for something that should be trivial by now).

Reading through the common F12 bugs was helpful since I got an overview of what to expect.

After backing up my files to the nearly depleted 500-GB FreeAgent Desktop drive, I cleaned up /boot:

$ df -h /boot
$ curl -O 'http://skvidal.fedorapeople.org/misc/kernel-prune.py'
$ chmod a+x kernel-prune.py
$ ./kernel-prune.py 
# PKGS=`./kernel-prune.py`
# yum remove $PKGS
# tune2fs -r 0 `mount | awk '/\/boot/ {print $1}"`

This involved trimming off the unused kernel versions still in /boot and adjusting the reserved filesystem blocks in that partition. It's safe to set the reserved blocks to "0" for /boot. (I've previously allocated 200 MB for the boot partition, and although the documentation says 300 MB is the recommended minimum, I think this size is safe. Yum is smart enough to remove unused kernel images after a few updates.)

Once the clean-up was done, I fired off PreUpgrade.

$ yum clean all
$ yum update
$ yum update preupgrade
$ preupgrade

This brought up a dialog box prompting for the version to upgrade to, and after that, it started downloading all the necessary packages (including installer stages 1 and 2). It took a while because my internet connection was slow that day, but after about three hours (!) downloading ~1.5 GB of packages, I rebooted and was presented with the Anaconda installer. I didn't have to input anything as it was automagic from thereon.

Fedora 12 booted up quickly (less than 20 seconds in my unscientific testing). I found most of my previous setup intact. I had to fix Picasa again because PreUpgrade used the Google repo and its borked wine-core DLL. Google Earth kept crashing though, so I filed a bug report. Aside from that, it was a smooth upgrade.