With Fedora 9 and the gnome desktop and a NVIDIA driver, it seems to update way too often, including too many newer kernel versions. So it will work fine for a while, then a group of updates will cause hanging on boot, (mostly that udev), and then will take much longer to load. And the Firefox browser had some delayed to open issues too. So my main question really is, if I install a newer Fedora version, such as 10 or 11, will it then get a lot less updates, so it can run more stable longer ?

No.

Fedora is designed to be bleeding edge.

However, you don't have to let it automatically update.

Have a look at /etc/yum.conf and /etc/yum/yum-updates.conf.

Since Fedora is bleeding edge though it has a fairly short life-cycle so your F11 install might be defunct within a year.

If you need stability you might want to do CentOS 5 instead. It has a longer life cycle. You'd still need to address the yum configuration as there will be updates for bug fixes, enhancements and security fixes.

that is fedora , updates often DO break things . and there are A LOT OF THEM .
my last fedora 11 update was 65 packages,then 5 days before 11 packages , then 3 days before that 85 packages , and so on and so on. my FIRST update ( when fedora 11 was less that 1 month old was 300+ packages.

If you do not like this then use something else
If you do not really LIKE FIXING things then Fedora is NOT for you , and use some other distro .

That is what I assumed that Fedora is really a Red Hat software testing place. What if I boot to the previous kernel, which is good, then use the Add Remove Programs package manager to remove the newest kernel and the related NVIDIA kernel module ? Well I did do this, and it showed security updates available right after, so I let it update, but that included that same newer kernel version too. I then canceled that update, rebooted, and now when updates runs, it hangs near the end, so never completes. Since it does boot and work well with the; 2.6.27-24.78.2-53, I should just turn off the automatic updates and leave it as is ?

did you cancel the update while it was downloading OR while it was installing

if downloading then cleanning out yum and rpm's database will solve the problem

if "yum clean all" throughs an error then run "rpm -rebuilddb fallowed by 'yum clean all '

I am fairly sure it was canceled during the install phase, and thanks, I will try that latter when I boot it again. Also do you know how long the kernel updates would be able to match my video card nvidia driver kernel module before display issues ? I do have the non free software repository for NVIDIA drivers set up, and only a basic Geforce 7300 GL card in this older 2006 Gateway computer. I had one recent nvidia driver logo with the words; beta driver, but overall my display works fine now. Thanks for help

for EVERY kernel , X11.and xorg update YOU MUST rebuild inat mvidia.run

AND reinstall mesa GL .The nvidia.run replaces the fedora GL files with only 90% compatable ones

the openGL *.so's and *.h files MUST be replaced
-- the min is these 4
mesa-libGL
mesa-libGL-devel
mesa-libGLU
mesa-libGLU-devel
------i also replace these --------
mesa-libGLw
mesa-libGLw-devel
mesa-dri-drivers
-- with the command
"yum reinstall mesa* "
once they are all installed the first time.

if cancelled the update during install then you might have no other option than to do a full reinstall

Is it possible to exclude the kernel in auto updates?
Something in yum.conf perhaps?

why do that ??
just set auto updates to manual

but you can add a line to EVERY repo file
exclude = kernel*

Well support for F9 will (or already has) drop very shortly. So after that there will be no further updates of any kind.

I see then and thanks to all for the information about this. If I want to then upgrade to Fedora 10 or 11, is a format and fresh install onto the same partition the best way, rather than from FC 9 upgrade attempt ? And is the KDE version of Fedora that newer and different kde 4. ? Will the older KDE 3.5.10 be available for Fedora 10 or 11, or is the standard gnome desktop more stable?

This issue is now fixed with John W post of running; yum clean all and the others in terminal, thanks for the help.

confirming the solution, re-ran the nvidia installer and the prob. is fixed.

im new to linux, and to the forum (1st post),
I was wonedring how you could tell what is causing the problem, how do i change the boot options so that i can find the problem???

Definitely recommend clean install every time.