Related link: http://fedora.redhat.com/download/
My joint’s a Dell Inspiron 8600 notebook with 2GB RAM and WUXGA display. It was running Fedora Core 2. All I did to upgrade was.
- grab the DVD ISO from the
torrent - (important step) leave the torrent on after completed download for 24 hours or so to pitch in bandwidth for other downloaders
- parallel to step (2) read the release notes
, backup important files and burn the ISO to DVD - Insert DVD, reboot, and proceed with guided install, choosing upgrade option
It rebooted and everything looked good at first. There were a few hiccups that I ran into and quickly sorted out. Side note: I found the relase notes to be a good deal of help. After install, the notes are the default page on all Fedora-installed browsers. Give them a quick top-to-bottom skim. You’ll be glad you did.
Empty GNOME Applications menu. I noticed that my GNOME applications menu was empty. I knew the whole menu was defined in a file, but I couldn’t remember just which one. A little googling later
this posting provided the lightbulb. I had no applications.menu, but rather a applications.menu.rpmsave as a dead link to /etc/alternatives/applications.menu. Looks like a broken RPM post-install script. I just steamrolled the mess (as root) with:
cd /etc/xdg/menus/
rm applications.menu.rpmsave
mv applications.menu.rpmorig applications.menu
I don’t remember whether I had to log out and log back in for the restored menu to take effect.
RPM keys for yum. Following various discussions on the topic, I decided I was going to experiment with ditching apt-rpm and sticking to yum in FC3. I immediately did a yum upgrade and found a lot of stuff updated since FC3 release, but it refused to actually install the RPMs because no GPG key was installed for built in Fedora. Now I think this one should probably have been taken care of by Anaconda (the installer), but it’s all cool since the release notes tell you exactly what to do. As root:
rpm --import /usr/share/rhn/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora
I added all my other favorite repositories: dag, dries, and atrpms, which also required that I add the GPG key for each. In all cases the key was an easy-to-find download. So far I’m happy with yum. It still feels a bit slower than apt, but it’s hella faster than it used to be in FC2.
The last core issue I ran into was the fact that the upgrade somehow broke the recognition of my DVD-RW as such. I had to edit /etc/grub.conf and add the phrase “hdc=ide-scsi” to my kernel boot parameters, run “grub-install /dev/hda” to commit the changes, and reboot. The resulting Grub stanza looks like:
title Fedora Core (2.6.9-1.667)
root (hd0,4)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.9-1.667 ro root=LABEL=/ noapic allowcddma apm=off acpi=on rhgb hdc=ide-scsi
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.9-1.667.img
I had some other upgrading adventures, but I’ll cover them in separate articles.
Did you install or upgrade FC3? If so, how did it go?
Grub
You don't need to run the installer after you make changes to the menu. Grub will pcik them up when you re-boot.
Easy upgrade
I upgraded from Fedora 2 to 3 rather easily. I got it from the torrent on the first day it was official. I use my linux box mostly over X windows over ssh from my mac. I noticed that the perforamce of doing this went up a lot. I had a little trouble running VMware at first. I tried the instructions in the release notes but they didn't work, so I removed and then reinstaleld vmware and now it works fine, and a bit faster too.
Using FC3 to turn a Dell 8600 into a 7.9 pound paperweight
I've been an avid user of Red Hat Linux since 1998, having done hundreds of installs over the years on a wide variety of machines. I've finished my RHCT and am on my way to RHCE. However, I'm at my boiling point with the Fedora Core releases when installed on dual boot machines.
I was bitten by FC2 before with a Disk Read Error while trying to boot Windows (http://www.talkingtree.com/blog/index.cfm?mode=alias&alias=FC2_DualBootBug), but Fedora has outdone itself this time leaving my Dell 8600 Inspiron unable to even display the grub splash screen. It shows the BIOS startup, then autoreboot, then BIOS startup, then autoreboot.
This lead me to log this bug: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=139467
Note, when booting up with Knoppix off CD I find that the Windows and FC3 partitions look good.
Now I start the tedious process of googling furiously and reading the news lists in order to recover my machine.
Here we go again....
-Steven Erat
Using FC3 to turn a Dell 8600 into a 7.9 pound paperweight
Looks much like this problem on the VIA C3 processor (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=120685)
I solved the problem by booting this image (http://people.redhat.com/arjanv/c3boot-2.iso) and from there up-/downgrading the kernel.
This should at least bring your system back to life.
Good luck.
upgrade using DVD and YUM
Hi, I just upgraded using both the DVD and YUM. Since I already had the DVD I wanted to use the DVD upgrade option. But, after reading some horror stories I figured I might try something else instead. Basically, what I wanted was to have all the latest packages (since maybe some intitial glitches were solved already), but not go through downloading the entire distro with YUM. So here's what I did:
- copied all the RPMs from the DVD to the YUM cache directory(/var/cache/yum/base/packages),
- downloaded and installed yum-2.1.11-3.rpm and fedora-release-3-8.rpm
- run yum upgrade
This then downloaded all the headers, plus the RPMs which are newer than the ones on the DVD. Worked like a charm :D