Upgrade to Fedora 13 from Fedora 12

After a week delay Fedora 13 has been released and it is time to upgrade of course. As always there are a decent number of features in this release but here are a few that stand out to me:

  • boot.fedoraproject.org – A small bootable image to start the install from.
  • IntelliJ IDEA – IntelliJ IDEA community edition. I'm glad to see my favorite IDE make it in along with Netbeans and Eclipse even if it is just the stripped down version.
  • Python 3 – Running along side Python 2.
  • Nouveau DisplayPort – Support for NVIDIA cards with a DisplayPort.
  • Radeon DisplayPort – Support for Radeon cards with a DisplayPort.
  • NetworkManager Command Line – A command line interface for NetworkManager. As much as I find myself hating NetworkManager maybe this will help.
  • Gnome 2.30 – The latest stable version of Gnome.
  • KDE 4.4 – The latest stable version of KDE.

Check out the Fedora 13 feature list for all the major features in this release.

I'm continuing with the trend of using PreUpdate to do the upgrade:

  1. Make sure you are using a Fedora 12 install. If you need instructions on getting to Fedora 12 then start with upgrading from Fedora 11 to Fedora 12.
  2. yum clean all
  3. yum update
  4. Make sure you have plenty of space free in the /boot partition. I learned this lesson the last time I upgraded.
  5. I always back up my xorg.conf file since because it seems to disappear sometimes.
  6. preupgrade-cli "Fedora 13 (Goddard)" – My Fedora 12 to Fedora 13 upgrade weighed in at 1.0GB
  7. reboot and wait

No dependency issues when upgrading this time making it two in a row. I was tempted to try out the Nouveau NVIDIA drivers this time around but the driver from NVIDIA are not too hard to upgrade now so I haven't found a real reason. If you don't want to compile the NVIDIA drivers by hand you can get them from atrpms, make sure to remove the Nouveau drivers first. The Fedora 13 version of Virtualbox was also needed.

I did run into a small issue with xorg after the upgrade. The NVIDIA driver requires the ignoreABI flag be sent to the X server on startup. I was able to modify startx but I always forget how to modify GDM. It turns out that you can also just put the flag in the xorg.conf file like this:

Section "ServerFlags"
        Option      "ignoreABI" "true"
EndSection

If you prefer the yum upgrade option here are the steps for that as well:

  1. yum clean all
  2. yum update
  3. rpm -Uvh http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/releases/13/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-13-1.noarch.rpm http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/releases/13/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-notes-13-3.fc13.noarch.rpm
  4. yum clean all
  5. yum -y update
  6. You may need to resolve dependencies and then do another yum -y update or in my case I had to use –skip-broken to resolve some issues with packages I've installed from atrpm.
  7. reboot

I needed to use the –skip-broken flag on yum this time but I didn't have to resolve any dependency issues. The resulting update was about 1.2G so it took a little while to apply.

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