eWEEK Labs Walk-Through: Upgrading to Fedora 10

by eWEEK Labs

Fedora picked up the capacity for conducting in-place upgrades (without the hit-or-miss results of previous in-place upgrade workarounds) during the Fedora 9 release. The 9-to-10 upgrade marked our first exposure to the tool.

The preupgrade tool, which we installed by typing “yum install preupgrade” into a terminal, offered us the option of moving to Version 10 or to Red Hat’s rolling development release, Rawhide.

The upgrade tool began by fetching a set of new packages from Fedora’s online software repositories.

With the needed packages downloaded, we were ready to reboot and continue the upgrade process.

Unlike the Ubuntu in-place upgrade process, Fedora’s upgrader does most of its installation work in a sort of system-limbo mode.

Our basic Fedora 9 installation required 792 package updates to become Fedora 10.

With our package updates behind us, we had ourselves a shiny new Fedora 10 installation-with a giant raft of additional updates to install. We’d like to see the system roll this step into the initial upgrade process.

The best thing about PackageKit, at this point, is its integration with the PolicyKit permissions management framework that ships with Fedora 10.