Upgrading to Fedora 9 From 8 Using preupgrade

Since F9 has been out for a bit, I decided to upgrade my Lenovo y410 lappy yesterday. Following are suggestions to make the process a little smoother for anyone else who upgrades.

First of all, there are a few different ways to upgrade. It can be done via yum exclusively, from the dvd, or by using the new preupgrade program. I chose the latter, but I did have an F9 install DVD handy, and I'm glad I did - you'll find out why in a bit. So, on to it.

#1. make sure you're on a reliable high-speed network and run the preupgrade program following all the prompts. this will download a core set of F9 rpms into a /var/yum/cache/upgrade directory.

#2 after that completes, it asks you to reboot. once again, make sure you are on a reliable high-speed network because there's more to be downloaded. if the installer can't recognize your NIC and network connection, you may need to try a USB NIC. Once I got the installer online it downloaded something then began installing the fc9 packages into my system.

#3 I had over 1400 rpm packages that got upgraded to get to the new OS - that took about 2 hours. Once that was complete I got a creen that said "finishing the upgrade process, this may take a little while." Indeed it did: 45 Mins later I was ready to reboot.

#4 on reboot the system loaded up the 2.6.24.7-92 kernel and all the modules loaded except cups, which failed. Also, the gnome GUI was a little strange and some other minor issues were there, but overall, the system was working.

#5 time to get updates. The familiar add/remove programs link was no longer present in the Applications menu (that program has been deprecated) so I used yumex to see what was out there. Well, it turns out the upgrade process did not update my yum repositories, which were still pointed at fedora 8 for updates from fedora as well as livna. To fix this, you need to edit the yum repo config files under /etc/yum.repo.d I just edited my fedora.repo file and livna.repo file changing out refs to f8 to f9 and set the gpgcheck flag to 0.

#6 running yumex again showed a lot of legitimate updates. I decided to update the kernel packages first including development and headers becuase I could not recompile the vbox kernel module with what the upgrade had installed.

#7 Once the updaes were installed, I rebooted. Shit! The machine got as far as black screen with GRUB _ and a blinking cursor. Glad I had the DVD becuase I needed to boot from dvd, go into rescue mode and fix the boot loader which had gotten screwed by the kernel update. Once you are in a command shell the following commands worked to fix grub:

#chroot /mnt/sysimage
#grub-install /dev/sda


#8 reboot and all was good.

#9 still some funky things going on with the GUI so overnight I installed all the updates for f9 from the updates repository and today everything is working like a champ.