Fedora 11 Leonidas, How to Upgrade

Please make sure to backup important files before starting the upgrade process. The upgrade should work without problems, but for your own safety: Backup your datas!

Update 2009-05-24: Please read the comment from Paul W. Frields (Thank you, Paul!) regarding the upgrade process before following this tutorial. I recommend you to wait until Leonidas is officially released and to not use the Rawhide-branch. (The procedure will be the same as mentioned here, but without the “Display unstable test releases above” check box setting.)

As you may have seen from the banner I’ve installed on the upper right at my webpage, Fedora 11 Leonidas will be here in the next few days.

All of you using Fedora 10 right now and who can’t stand the wait to upgrade to Leonidas there is a way to upgrade today to the last snapshot of the yet unreleased version of Fedora 11 Leonidas.

First of all you’ll need the tool preupgrade, which can be found in the official repos and installed via

sudo yum install preupgrade

Start preupgrade via pressing F2 entering ‘preupgrade’ and pressing enter. You should be greeted with this window:

Preupgrade startup message

In the following diaogue you’ll have to select “Display unstable test releases above” and select “Rawhide” from the dropdown list. Again, make sure you’ve backup’d your important datas before applying your selection.

Preupgrade Release Selection

After the official release of Fedora 11 you will install a fedora-release transition package, which will change the release name from Rawhide to the general Leonidas release name. So you’ll not longer fetch Rawhide (beta/testing) packages unless you want it. (Make sure to update your system on time after the official release date, unless you might miss the fedora-release transition package and stay at the Rawhide-repositories — don’t panic: you can still disable them by hand in /etc/yum.repos.d/* or via the graphical package manager)

If you’re not using Linux or Fedora at now, Leonidas may be a great oppertunity to test it. There will be Live-CDs avaible after Leonidas is released, so you can test it without actually installing it on your machine.

Follow either the official Fedora Website for the release date or the counter at my site to be informed about the arrival of Fedora 11 Leonidas.

Web resources

January 17, 2009 -- Fedora Yellow Update Manager (yum) Database-Errors (quick fix)
September 8, 2009 -- Updated Wordpress, Result: New Design and Layout, Loss of Recordings
February 13, 2010 -- Back again
March 18, 2009 -- Finite State Machine Matrix-Style-C-Implementation (Function Pointers Addon)
October 25, 2008 -- New Design
September 8, 2008 -- Finite State Machine Matrix-Style C Implementation
August 1, 2008 -- Interesting Statistics or Why Art Thou There
July 15, 2008 -- Hello world!

Paul W. Frields

I believe the branching off point where Rawhide leaves the pre-F11 stage and becomes F12 happens several days before our release day — in other words, at some point next week. Anyone wanting to preupgrade to Rawhide in its pre-F11 form should probably do so in the next few days! Great tip and hope you enjoy F11.

May 24, 2009 @ 3:34 pm

bgedan

Hi Paul,

thanks for that hint. I’ve added a paragraph mentioning your comment and recommending to wait for the official release, before starting the upgrade process.

At least one should take a carefully look at the dropdown list of avaible releases and verifiy that the selection is what is wanted before actually starting the upgrade process.

May 24, 2009 @ 8:31 pm