Updgrading to Fedora 17 - preupgrade

I took this advice in upgrading via yum seriously :

However Fedora 17 is very special. You should seriously consider stopping now and just using anaconda via. DVD or preupgrade, unlike all previous releases it's what the yum/rpm developers recommend. Continue at your own risk.

I decided to use preupgrade. I would have preferred yum as I would have more control over the update even if it were riskier. Anyway, the preupgrade went through nicely overnight. About 4 GB was downloaded and I was ready for the final stage.

Uses grub2 

I rebooted the system and it did nothing. I have continued to use grub and had not migrated to grub2. Preupgrade had created a new file grub.cfg in /boot/grub2. After failing to get the upgrade kernel to boot from grub, I installed grub2. It was easier than I had feared. It left the grub.cfg file untouched. I rebooted and the upgrade started.

It soon told me that I needed an additional GB of space. After making the additional space, I rebooted and the upgrade started. Everything was fine until it was cleaning up files. It just wouldn't end. I noticed at least 3 times glibc being cleaned up. There was little option but to reboot.

The reboot went through the upgrade process and felt that everything was done. I was ready to reboot into Fedora 17, except that the grub.cfg file was still the same and the preupgrade files had been removed. Fortunately, using the minimal editor in grub, I could boot using the F17 kernel. The first thing I did was to create a new grub.cfg file. The fireworks on the desktop looked nice.

SSH and password-less login

One minor issue was that I needed to give the password for using ssh from my remote system. I needed to copy authorized_keys2 to authorized_keys in .ssh.

Firefox crashes

Firefox seems to crash with a few tabs. It seems to be a random problem. However, if I download Firefox 12 from Mozilla, it works fine!

Save preupgrade files in case you want to upgrade more than one system.

I did not want to download the files again for my netbook. As a precaution, I had saved all the preupgrade files, in particular the rpm packages. As I feared, it cleaned up and even though keepcache was set, there were no packages of fedora 17 in the yum cache after the upgrade.