Upgrading to Fedora 16

I upgraded my Fedora installation from Release 15 to Release 16 today. It was a very smooth upgrade, although I don’t run much on Fedora — mostly trying things out for teaching in class. I was very impressed, though, with how well the upgrade went.

It wasn’t completely seamless, though, but that was my fault. Let me explain. I’m running Fedora in a virtual machine on my Mac, using VirtualBox. My primary Linux box is a Xiao Hu thin client computer, a MIPS processor based system, and I run Debian on it. But, because I’m teaching a Linux class using Fedora, I wanted to be able to test things out and make sure that things I was used to doing in Debian worked similarly on Fedora. Anyways, because I don’t use Fedora full-time, I created a small 8GB disk to hold the OS. Unfortunately, I needed more than that much space to upgrade, and that caused a slight, but easily manageable, hiccup.

My disk is configured with a 500MB /boot partition, a 6GB / partition, and the rest of the disk is used as swap space. With all the packages installed that we use in class, I’m using just under 4GB on my root partition, leaving a couple gig free.

To upgrade from Fedora Release 15 to 16, I installed and ran the preupgrade package. As part of its installation process, it checks to make sure that there’s enough free space available to do the upgrade. Of course, with all the crap I always seem to accumulate, there wasn’t, and it warned me that I needed to free up about half a gig of space. When I did that, the installation process continued, downloading all the upgraded packages (1130 of them!), then the system rebooted and began to install the new release. Unfortunately, during that installation, it again detected that there wasn’t enough space available, and reported I needed to free up another ~800MB of space! I just didn’t have enough available, so I had to stop the upgrade. Amazingly, I rebooted the VM, and I was back in Fedora 15 with no problems! That was a pleasant surprise, because I was worried that I’d be in a half-installed state, but that wasn’t the case.

It was an easy solution; using VirtualBox’s modifyhd command, I was able to increase the size of my virtual disk, increasing it to 12GB, and I created a new partition with that extra 4GB in it. Now, I needed to free up space on the root partition, and most of the space was being taken up in /var/cache/yum, where the upgrade was storing the updated packages. That was easy — I created a yum directory on my new partition, moved the contents of /var/cache/yum into there, then mounted the new partition on top of /var/cache/yum. That freed up enough space on the root partition to proceed.

At that point, I restarted “preupgrade”, and that quickly detected that I had already downloaded all of the updated packages, AND it saw that I now had enough disk space, so it automatically continued the upgrade. That ran without further input from me, so I wandered off to do something else, and when I came back, I had a nice Fedora 16 system running!

Screenshot of new Fedora 16 desktop

So, although I had a problem, I was very impressed by how well the upgrade process recovered from the problem and finished up the upgrade with little intervention from me. Good job, Fedora!

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