Upgrading Fedora 8 to Fedora 9 (beta)

This article is based on an article by brandon hutchinson

I noticed with some glee (as most geeks do) that Fedora 9 was on the way in 17 days. Could I wait 17 days? I needed to remove the Ubuntu install on my machine, and replace it with one that at least gave me a root terminal when I asked for one, without messing about with removing the security. Ubuntu, I’m told, is very nice, but for older hardware, I’m personally sticking with Fedora.

The idea of downloading another DVD iso, and then burning it to disk, and then going through the rather long upgrade process didn’t please me. It would mean, for a start, not having my machine while it did the upgrade. (One of the things, perhaps, Ubuntu has over Fedora is that the install gives you a virtual version of Ubunty to play with (it’s just not very pretty)).

I thought that there must be a way of upgrading using yum, so I went looking. The key appears to be the fedora-release package. By upgrading this, and then running a yum update everything works smoothly.

So, the steps for doing this are:

1. download: http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/development/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-8.93-1.noarch.rpm
   (or navigate to the directory containing the release you want to upgrade too)
2. Run(as root): rpm -Uvh fedora-release-8.93-1.noarch.rpm
3. Run(as root): yum update

Note It can take 4 GB to dowload all the files. Ensure that you have enough space in /var to put them. If not, symlink the directory: /var/cache/yum/rawhideto somewhere that does.

Hope that helps,

Black Xanthus