Fedora 17 End of Life: Where to next ?
 

So I'm running Fedora 17 on my HP Pavilion G6 laptop, and I've got it fully customized just the way I like it. I've been running Fedora since it had a core suffix, but I've only recently got into yum update-ing since I didn't have a solid internet connection before.

Now what I've run into is that fedora 17 has reached it's end of life. I've looked it up and there's a tool called fedup to update me to newer releases, but since my system is running solidly at this point, I want a few reviews before I get my hands dirty.

Has anyone used this method to update their systemm? How succesful were you, and would you recommend it? Thanks.

Tried it once IIRC on a system from F15 to F16. Required 1 GB free space in /boot IIRC?.. Wasn't successful. On another system I upgraded from F16 to F18 the system refused to boot into the Desktop Environment. Not because of upgrade problems but due to ~/ settings prohibiting proper a launch. Moving /home out of the way, installing from scratch and then migrating settings / files seems to be the safest procedure for me.
*BTW it's better to have backups you don't need than to find you need backups you didn't make.

Fedora 17 End of Life: Where to next ?
 

didnt work for me. i ended up backing up, replacing fedora and reintegrating the settings. be sure to get an rpm-qa for your package lists. it helps.

the FedUp works great. follow their instructions and be aware of the very few issues like Chrome, or some local RPMs that you might have. I have used FedUp a few times and several guys in our LUG have used it and love it.

FedUp and away and enjoy

I moved to OpenSUSE after getting off the fedora "new install every 6 months" roller coaster

In place upgrades never worked and "preupgrade" never worked well for me .

A bit longer life span 18 months VS 13
and unless you install " factory" it is not SO bleeding edge


for upgrading from 12.2 to 12.3 i did an inplace upgrade and had no real issues , just a few small minor everyday issues

Kernel 2.10 but still pushing down Firefox 22.. with Fedora you're less than a user, you're a corporate test rat. :eek: Almost went back to Ubuntu but Linux Mint 15 had everyhting I needed plus all the proprieteray codecs (MP3 and DVD) were pre-installed.


Bye bye Red Hat. :D

Just as a reminder - preupgrade is no longer available and has been replaced by Fedup.

Fedup has done an amazing job for me whenever I have tried. Most of the accounts I have read about 'Fedup' upgrading has been positive. Do try the upgrade (after backup)! :)

Also, F19 is, in my opinion, a rock solid distribution and in my hands, the most stable distro (of all I have tried).

Fedora is a testing ground for Red Hat....and for years now Red Hat have been where much of the kernel work is done, and work on other farily important projects as well.

Ubuntu is a testing ground for ubuntu. You're still a corporate test rat, but with canonical/ubuntu you're a test rat for a company that doesnt give much, if anything, back to 'upstream'. The only projects they do much work on are those in house projects which require people to 'sign' the 'canonical contributor agreement'.

With the ubuntu based versions of mint you are still a corporate test rat, its just not quite so obvious.

um, lets see, the kernel 2.x has not been used in Fedora since oh 12 or 13 or so, so years now it has not run anything that old. the current Fedora 19 is running: 3.10 while Fedora 18 is running 3.9.

to add to cascade9 post, dont forget that Canonical is not only selfish in what they do, but their desktop OS is full of intentional built in MALWARE that collects and sells your personal data to the likes of Amazon and Facebook WITHOUT YOUR CONSENT OR KNOWLEDGE for the most part.

so please know what you are talking about before you spout out the wrong side of your mouth FUD just like Microsoft does on a daily basis. Thank you.

Yeah, yeah, you caught a typo, that makes you a genius I suppose. Anywho, Linux Mint 15 is using kernel 3.8 instead of Fedora's bleeding edge 3.10 which is bug central. Corporations like Red Hat need to be financially responsible members of the community and pay people for testing their software.

this thread has really digressed and is getting rather off topic
unsubscribing

Indeed. Please keep this thread on topic.

i have been fighting an issue with Fedup on systems with FULL DISK ENCRYPTION... fedup does not work. it breaks and i can not get an answer as to why.

So if you are using Full disk encryption on your Fedora 17 box, DO NOT use fedup to upgrade to 18/19 respectively. it is broke. you will get the new data on your system but it will not be bootable into the newer kernels. you will be stuck on F17.

Hmm.... as for complexity of the system mine is a fairly standard install ..... I do

Hmm.. i do have a couple of encrypted partitions but root isn't one of them, so that shouldn't be an issue. My main concern is that I have spent months tuning my system, so that what I have on my hands is a set-up that gives me 4.5+ hours of battery life, looks exactly as I want it to, does exactly what I want it to, and has everything I need. The only thing is that I do want updates, but I really don't want to re-install everything from scratch!

If fed-up fails, would I have to do just that? Do post install issues crop up? I've got such a comfortable configuration that I don't want to mess it up :o

BTW, I do know that Ubuntu does collect user information, and that Canonical doesn't contribute code upstream. Red Hat is just a company that is promoting open source software in the corporate world and making a profit along the way. Most of all, they do contribute code back. Plus Fedora is community oriented, and while Red Hat does have a say in its affairs, the community plays a big role too. Personally I've been using Red Hat as well as Debian on my systems, and both seem like good solid stable distributions. Rather than ubuntu IMHO debian would be the better choice if you don't want to go the Red Hat way.

when you update it will update your GUI if you are using Gnome, and i can only guess the same for KDE. If fedup fails then you might be forced to format/install but one of the guys in my LUG (linux user group) said he could figure that stuff out, but then again he works for RedHat :D as one of their top field engineers. The guy knows his Linux and not just RH, but Debian based too including Ubuntu and works almost daily with guys over at Canonical.

As for the configuration files, most of those should remain the same unless they are being replaced with the new systemd. I have to say I am really looking forward to RHEL 7 going live later this year. I plan on using CentOS 7 and rebuilding my server to take advantage of systemd over the older sysV that is used in RHEL 6 and older.

systemd takes much better advantage of modern hardware by allowing services and daemons to run in parallel vs the older sysV performing tasks linear and breaking if it got specific services out of order. ex: attempting to connect to a remote share before the network is up. typical problem in sysV, seldom happens in systemd as they both run at the same time now.