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Fedora 12 to 13: Worst upgrade ever.

Some people think I’m strange for running Fedora as my primary operating system at home, but I’ve always liked it.  The stuff I need to be stable is always rock-solid, and if there is a new feature in a program I use, I’ll get it a year before it goes into Ubuntu or RHEL. Poking, prodding, and breaking stuff occasionally is half the fun.

BUT in my history using Red Hat Linux 6 through all the Fedoras, I have never had upgrade problems like I had going to Fedora 13.

  1. The DVD media wouldn’t boot. Something to do with my motherboard I think. Same media and DVD-drive work fine if plug it in via a SATA-to-USB adapter cable.
  2. Upgrading existing installation did not work.  The installer didn’t see my Fedora 12 installation and wanted to re-partition my drive.
  3. When I installed Fedora 13 on a blank HDD, I had problems using the NVIDIA driver.  I’m sure Nouveau is coming along leaps and bounds, but until it can beat the NVIDIA proprietary drivers, I don’t want it.  Probably could have fixed this, but I gave up.
  4. I re-imaged back to Fedora 12, then tried using “preupgrade”.  It downloaded 1.5 Gigabytes of data then failed to work. Told me it couldn’t find my /root.
  5. I finally resorted to the non-recommended option – upgrade via “yum”.  This worked pretty well. I had a few small issues (all my USB devices worked in Virtualbox except my printer) but nothing more than the usual upgrade quirks. I am typing this on a working Fedora 13.

I guess it could have been worse, I could have installed Windows 7 😉

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