Fedora 12 was just released and it is time to upgrade again of course. I almost thought this was going to be a version to yawn at but then I saw that there was going to be a new version of Fedora based on Moblin and it seemed exciting again. Of course that isn't the only thing being upgraded in the latest version of Fedora. Some of the more notable changes in this version:

• Updated window managers Gnome 2.28, KDE 4.3 and Fedora Moblin
• Delta RPM support
• i686 as the base architecture
• Lots of virtualization changes: KSM, KVM huge page support, KVM QCow2 performance improvements, KVM Stable Guest ABI, libguestfs, Virtual network management and improved virtual privileges to name a few
• An easier to use bug reporting interface Abrt 1.0
• Better Webcam Support

You can find the complete list of Fedora 12 enhancements as well if you want more details.

I'm again starting with PreUpdate since it worked well last time. The steps are pretty much the same as last time but I did have more problems after the upgrade:

1. You have to be at Fedora11 before you try this. If you aren't there follow the steps to get to Fedora11.
2. yum clean all
3. yum udpate
4. Make sure to back up your xorg.conf since it can disappear with the upgrade.
5. preupgrade-cli "Fedora 12 (Constantine)" The total download for the upgrade from Fedora 11 to Fedora 12 was 1.1GB for me
6. After I rebooted the first time I got an error that the /boot directory didn't have enough space. It turns out I needed about 27M of free space so I ended up having to delete old kernels until I had 28M of free space.
7. reboot and wait

I lucked out again and didn't have to remove anything to fix dependency issues. I recompiled my existing NVIDIA driver but I ran into an issue with the nouveau NVIDIA driver that comes with Fedora 12. I needed to remove the nouveau package, rebuild initrd and reboot before I could build the NVIDIA driver:

yum remove xorg-x11-drv-nouveau.i686
rm /boot/initramfs-2.6.31.5-127.fc12.i686.img
mkinitrd /boot/initramfs-2.6.31.5-127.fc12.i686.img 2.6.31.5-127.fc12.i686

If that is too much work you can also get the NVIDIA driver from atrpms but you will still need to remove the nouveau driver first. I also needed to pull down the Fedora 12 version of Virtualbox but so far that was all.

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/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-notes-12.0.0-4.fc12.noarch.rpm http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/releases/12/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-12-1.noarch.rpm
4. yum clean all
5. yum -y update
6. You may need to resolve dependencies and then do another yum -y update
7. reboot

I had to resolve dependencies to get this to work. I had to remove tigervnc-server-1.0.0-2.fc11.i586 and VirtualBox-3.0.10_54097_fedora11-1.i586. The resulting update was about 1.4G so it took a little while to apply.

I've also put together a few videos and screenshots if you want to get a quick preview of what the different versions available look like. You can also view the videos on Youtube: Moblin, KDE and Gnome