Fedora 18 to 19 upgrade with fedup: It’s alive!

fedora_19_with_catalyst_13_point_six

After a shaky start with Fedora’s fedup update tool to bring my Fedora 18 with Xfce system to Fedora 19, I did manage to successfully upgrade my HP Pavilion g6-2210us (with AMD A4-4300M APU, which features AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics).

After a curl error on my work network, I started the process on my much slower home network, quickly bypassed the error and started on the slow process of downloading 1,800+ packages.

The download process went through the night — at least eight hours — and continued in the morning. Besides the Fedora repositories, I have quite a bit of software from RPM Fusion, so that made everything take that much longer.

There’s a problem with the Dropbox repo, since Dropbox hasn’t created a /19/ version (or directory) yet. I ended up changing the name of dropbox.repo in /etc/yum.repos.d/ to dropbox.broken. And now yum and Yumex safely ignore it. Eventually I’ll change the name back to .repo and see if Dropbox has gotten it together for Fedora users.

A few Fedora 18 packages don’t have Fedora 19 equivalents. But that’s OK. Everything seems to be working.

The process took a long time, and for most of it I had no idea how much time — or how many tasks — were ahead of me. Fedup has a long way to go in terms of its user interface. But it does work.

Once the packages were downloaded and I rebooted into what would become the fedup upgrade process, I was in for another wait — it was at least an hour, probably longer — before I could boot into the fully upgraded Fedora 19.

But boot into it I did. Once I figured out the Dropbox repo situation (as I said, I pretty much commented it out by changing its .repo suffix) I thought I’d look to see if the AMD Catalyst video driver situation had changed in RPM Fusion.

Before now, only the Catalyst 13.4 driver seemed to be available in packaged format. And as I’ve written many times, I will NEVER again use the Catalyst/fglrx driver direct from AMD. There’s too much that can go wrong.

So I went into Yumex (a graphical front end for yum that I really, really like) and searched for Catalyst. I was surprised to find a package for the 13.6 beta driver ready to install. And so I did.

I rebooted, and everything looks great. I’ve been running Xfce for the last couple of months because without working 3D acceleration I can’t run GNOME 3.8 at all. I immediately tested 3D by running a game that requires it.

Almost-perfect video. About the only problem I see are the lack of dark links on the sides of application windows. I removed Catalyst temporarily, and it is indeed causing this small display problem. But it’s a very, very small price to pay for working 3D and — as I just discovered — working suspend/resume in Linux for the first time in my history of using this laptop.

While I’m very happy to have working 3D video, I don’t see myself installing GNOME at the moment. Xfce has been working too well during my time in Fedora 18. I get work done, and I enjoy the desktop environment. In case you are wondering, it’s the same Xfce — version 4.10 — in both F18 and F19. There isn’t a new stable release of Xfce, unless I haven’t heard about it.

Now my occasional artifacts in Xfce should be gone for good, and if I wanted to run GNOME 3.8.x, I absolutely could.

All I have to do now is watch for Catalyst 3.6 to go stable and make sure I can stick with it rather than riding the next beta.

You can’t see it in the screenshot above, but there’s a small overlay in the lower right corner of the screen that says “AMD Testing use only.” That’s a nice reminder.

I’d prefer to run the free Radeon driver. It’s easier to do. I’ll keep my eye on it and keep trying live media with future releases.

But I’m extremely happy to solve my video issues on this new hardware. Probably the biggest change will be working suspend/resume. I grew to rely on it on my Lenovo G555 running Debian, and I’m extremely happy to have it back on the HP Pavilion g6.

Speaking of new hardware, it’s the reason I turned to Fedora, as I have before in this same situation. You do get cutting-edge everything. Applications? I can live with slightly older versions. But when I’m having trouble with new hardware and kernels and drivers, Fedora is a great way to get up and running.

Thanks to all involved in the Fedora Project for providing such a surprisingly stable distribution, even with so many new bits. And thanks to everybody who contributes the naughty bits to RPM Fusion that I’m using to round out this laptop’s multimedia-centered system.

3 thoughts on “Fedora 18 to 19 upgrade with fedup: It’s alive!

  1. All night? My KDE-based update took only a couple of hours and involved approximately 2300 packages. (Still using dial-up, Steve?) As for the interface – it’s certainly better than the nightmare of reinstalling Windows!

  2. While it is not in Fedora, now that you mention using Xfce:
    Have you tried using the Whisker Menu?
    It is included by default in Mint Xfce and Manjaro. It makes for an interesting addition – not so much for me, because I use a runbox for pretty much everything; but it looks good and works well.

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