Fedora 13 is due in less than 2 weeks (as of today) but I decided not to wait any longer and upgrade my existing Fedora 12 x86_64 installation. The following describes what you need to do to upgrade to Fedora 13 using yum.

First, you need to upgrade these 2 packages:

fedora-release-12-2.noarch

fedora-release-notes-12.0.2-1.fc12.noarch

Enabling the rawhide repository to search for updates using yum won’t do the trick, since Fedora 14 is already in rawhide, so you need to download the packages from a mirror (here’s a mirror list for Fedora 13 x86_64)

After downloading the packages, install them as root with:

rpm -Uvh fedora-release-*

Confirm the release file change by running:

cat /etc/fedora-release

Fedora release 13 (Goddard)

If you use packages from the RPM Fusion repository, you’ll be happy to find that you don’t need to update rpmfusion-free and rpmfusion-nonfree RPMs (http://rpmfusion.org/Configuration). Whether it’s Fedora 11, 12, 13 Alpha or Beta, the repo will detect what needs to be installed / updated based on $releasever from the repo configuration files.

Now run:

yum upgrade

If you get any missing dependencies, try uninstalling them first and re-run ‘yum upgrade’.

All was fine for me and I got ~1.2GB of data to download as you can see in the screenshot.

After a couple of hours of installing / updating packages and a reboot, I’m finally running Fedora 13.