Upgraded to Fedora 19 Alpha alias Schrödinger’s Cat

Fedora 19 Alpha KDE Splash Screen

Fedora 19 Alpha KDE Splash Screen

Fedora, formerly Fedora Core, is an RPM-based, general purpose collection of software, including an operating system based on the Linux kernel, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and owned by Red Hat. The Fedora Project’s mission is to lead the advancement of free and open source software and content as a collaborative community.

—Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fedora_%28operating_system%29

Last weekend I was brave enough to install the KDE spin of Fedora 19 Alpha on my main working laptop and as by now everything is running great.

So get it now (torrents), have a look at the release schedule for the final release date or study the feature list to see what’s new.

Up until then I was still running Fedora 17 alias Beefy Miracle but slowly it feels old and I had to install some more recent packages from Fedora 18 to be able to compile other programs.

So it was time to upgrade to and since i know how to fix a broken system I decided to skip Fedora 18 and directly install Fedora 19 Alpha.

I’ve done a clean install and before the upgrade I’ve backed up the most important configuration files as well as my home directory. I was able to crash the installer four or five times but then everything went well.

Before the upgrade I’ve created a list of all my installed packages:

[chris@fedora-17 ~]$ rpm -qa --queryformat "%{NAME}.%{ARCH}\n" >packages_thinkpad_F19.log

So that I can reinstall them all at once:

[chris@fedora-19 ~]$ sudo yum -y --skip-broken install $(cat ./packages_thinkpad_before_F19.log )

This will also install a lot of packages that I don’t need anymore (1643 packages +192 dependent packages) but it will save a me lot of time as I don’t have to find all dependencies again when compiling something from source and disk space is cheap nowadays.

You can find my current package list here: packages_thinkpad_F19.log

I’m very happy that sagemath has finally made it into Fedora (sudo yum install sagemath).

Now I have to rebuild all packages that I had installed from sources and then I’m finished.

Btw. I’m running kernel 3.9.0-0.rc8.git0.2.fc19.x86_64 and KDE 4.10.2 at the moment.

If I encounter any update problems or other issues until the final release I will update the blog post below. Lets see how it evolves.

Update: