Easy upgrade to Fedora 19

A new Fedora release came out early this month and I eventually decided to perform the upgrade from Fedora 18. Since I had bad experiences in the past with the older PreUpgrade GUI and I didn’t have the time to play with the new FedUP tool, I decided to use yum which I find much easier anyway. Unlike in the past, now it is really a no-brainer to perform an upgrade.

 

1. Make sure your Fedora 18 OS is updated

 

sudo yum update

 

2. Reboot the machine after applying updates

 

sudo init 6

 

3. After reboot, switch to runlevel 3

 

sudo init 3

 

4. Import the Fedora 19 GPG key

 

sudo rpm --import https://fedoraproject.org/static/FB4B18E6.txt

 

5. Perform the upgrade

 

sudo yum --releasever=19 distro-sync

 

At this stage yum will attempt to upgrade all packages that were installed through the active repositories. Any issues like package conflicts or missing dependencies will be reported during the yum transaction testing phase and the actual upgrade is only started when the test phase is completed successfully.

 

6. Verify the upgrade log

After the packages installation has finished it is recommended to check the yum transaction log for additional details. Usually configuration files are not updated for most services, so for example upgrading openssh-server creates a new config file called /etc/ssh/sshd_config.rpmnew instead of overwriting the existing /etc/ssh/sshd_config. Depending on a number of factors (e.g. new features, deprecated configuration directives etc.), you might want to run a diff between the older and the newer file (more info here).

 

sudo yum history
sudo yum history info $transaction_ID

 

  7. Reboot into Fedora 19

 

If all went well up to this point, you should boot into the newly installed OS after the restart.

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