Another Upgrade - Fedora 12

Continuing with the strategy I have used with the last few upgrades, I installed fedora-release-12-1.noarch.rpm and cleaned the /var/cache/yum directory.

Next step was
sudo yum update --skip-broken

The upgrade went through and took about 20 hours on a 512Kbps line. The broken packages seemed to have been caused by desktop-data-model, which does not appear to be present in Fedora 12.

The installation was clean after I removed desktop-data-model and updated the broken packages.

At first glance, everything seemed fine. I could start an X session from a thin computer as well.

However, Miro wouldn't work. It seemed to run but no display. I subsequently found the same issue with Nautilus. Google search found a person with a problem using Nautilus and he could overcome it by removing gstreamer-plugins-ugly and gstreamer-plugins-bad. This worked for me as well though it did not seem very logical.

I reinstalled both one at a time to find the culprit. However, there was no problem! I presume the broken package during the upgrade may have been the cause of another ir-reproducible experience.

This time I have kept a record of the rpm packages and versions before the upgrade. I hope to analyse the versions to test my belief that the upgrade effort is excessive for the benefit. We need a better way to manage packages.

If I am convinced, I will explore Arch Linux or Gentoo and switch my parents' computer as well. My parents, who are over 80, have not had any difficulty in using Fedora for their common tasks, except when I compulsively update or upgrade their system for no particular reason and break some application. I am searching for a quick undo.