Tag: Fedora

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Fedora LogoA few days ago, my Linux desktop at work popped up a message saying that Fedora 11 was available, and asking whether I wanted to upgrade automatically. Well, I didn’t have time to deal with it then, and in the past when I’ve upgraded Fedora (either from a CD or from a downloaded image), it’s been a big production, what with running the installer, rebooting, installing updates, updating third-party repositories, and finally rebooting again after all the updates are installed.

So I put it off for a few days.

Today I decided to try it.

The automatic upgrade program is called preupgrade, presumably because it downloads everything you need in order to prepare for the upgrade. It downloads everything while your system is up and running, then sets it up so that when you reboot, it will launch the installer. It installs everything, makes the changes, then reboots into the newly upgraded system.

And then it’s done.

It’s network aware, and works through yum, so it will actually take into account both third-party repositories and anything that’s been updated since the new release. It actually went out to livna.org RPM Fusion and picked up the appropriate NVIDIA display drivers.

Download while you work. Reboot. Wait. Done.

The only snafu I ran into was that it removed my copy of the Flash plugin, but I think I was using the experimental 64-bit one anyway, so it’s not terribly surprising.

I get the impression that Ubuntu has had a similarly smooth upgrade process for a while. And after my experiences moving from Fedora 9 to Fedora 10, I was seriously considering jumping ship. (Hazards of living on the bleeding edge.) But it looks like I won’t have to.

Now I just have to find time to play around and see what’s new!

Update: I’ve run into one snafu: xkb error popups every time I wake the computer from suspend. Resetting the keyboard worked.

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Fedora Linux.I haven’t been following the progress of Fedora 9 very closely (possibly because it took me until last month to finally upgrade my home PC to Fedora 8), but as the release date of April 29 May 13 approaches, I thought I’d take a look at the release notes for an overview of what’s new. Of course there’s the usual upgrades to the various desktop environments, including, finally, KDE4, but something that surprised me was the inclusion of Firefox 3 beta 5.

Admittedly, Linux distributions often include non-final software by necessity. Many open-source projects spend years in the 0.x state not because they don’t work well, but because the authors don’t feel that it’s complete yet. (Often, a project will take their checklist and build feature 1, stabilize it, add feature 2, stabilize that, etc. so that you get a program that’s a stable subset of the target. Off the top of my head, FreeRADIUS was quite stable long before it hit 1.0, and Clam AntiVirus has been quite usable despite the fact that its latest version is 0.93.)

FirefoxLately, though, there’s been a tendency toward sticking with the latest stable release, at least for projects that have reached that magical 1.0 number. Sometimes they go even further. Only a year and a half ago, Fedora planned to skip Firefox 2 and wait for version 3. (Clearly, they expected Firefox 3 would be out sooner!) So it was a surprise to see that this time, Fedora has decided to jump on the new version before it’s finished.

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Fedora LogoThe code name for Fedora 9 Linux has been chosen, and it’s going to be Sulphur. Because a foul-smelling rock associated with rotten eggs and depictions of Hell is just what we want to identify an operating system. (Actually, it might not be too far off for Windows Vista.)

Bathysphere was only 8 votes behind. Weird, but considerably cooler.

Oh, well. At least it’s not Mayonnaise or Chupacabra. And some of the other names on that list are considerably worse.

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Fedora LogoFedora 8 has just been released, code-named “Werewolf.” As is tradition for this particular Linux distribution, the official release announcement is accompanied by an alternative, humorous announcement playing off the code name.

This time, the joke announcement is a song parody of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” And unlike a lot of really bad filk I’ve seen (online and otherwise), it’s surprisingly not bad (for all the subject matter is a bit odd. At least, from what I remember of the original song, it scans.

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It’s funny: When Microsoft releases a new OS, my inclination is to sit it out and wait for the first service pack, usually a year or so in. When Apple or Fedora releases a new OS, my inclination is to upgrade as soon as I have the time. Even though all of them have had histories of significant problems on one release or another—the broken video driver I ran into on Fedora 7, for instance, or the firewire drives fried by one version of Mac OS X.

I’m not sure why that is. Maybe it’s trust. Maybe it’s speed of the fixes: Linux vendors will have updated packages within days to weeks. (Heck, some Linux distros have updates available by the time the ISOs go live, because a bug was fixed after the contents were frozen.) And you can count on a Mac OS 10.5.1 in a month or two. Maybe it’s the scale of problems. You risk things like broken drivers or software with anyone’s major OS upgrade, but Windows always seems to have some problem that’s bigger than just a bug fix, something that needs more time and effort to redesign. In short, something that won’t get fixed until the next service pack.

Update 2026: Sadly, this is no longer true. For the last few years, I’ve been holding off my macOS updates for at least a year, which usually means waiting until the next version after it launches. As for Windows…I put in for the extra year of Windows 10 fixes and downgraded a device from Windows 11 because the one piece of hardware I “upgraded” turned into an unusably slow mess.

Somewhere along the line I got in the habit of waiting a couple of weeks on Fedora updates to make sure third-party graphics drivers catch up, which turned out to be fortunate with the most recent release.

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White LightningA question over at the Comic Bloc Forums reminded me that I hadn’t gotten around to writing a full profile of the Impulse villain, White Lightning. Fortunately I had a full list of appearances already, so I was able to look up the answer to the question, but it felt like being caught totally unprepared. So yesterday I re-read all her appearances, and tonight I wrote up a profile of White Lightning.

Just for fun, I did some searches for her name. Mostly I came up with cars, horses, wax and, of course, booze. And an alpaca. Back to the booze, there was one point at which the character was mistakenly identified as as Moonshine (later explained away as an in-world mix-up, which would have made more sense if she hadn’t been the one calling herself the wrong name!)

Fedora LogoNow the funny thing: the “…in pop culture” section in Wikipedia’s article on Moonshine reminded me that Fedora 7, which just came out last week and which I installed at work a few days ago, is codenamed Moonshine.

The only way the timing could have been more appropriate would be if I’d written the character bio the same day as the Linux release.

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Fedora Core is following the path blazed by the Linux kernel: having started out as primarily an x86-based project (the 32-bit Intel-based processors from the 386 through the Pentium 4 and Athlon), it’s branching out. Versions 2 and 3 added support for the AMD-64 chips (basis of the Opteron and Athlon 64), and now, with the first test release of Fedora Core 4, official support for both 32-bit and 64-bit PowerPC.

There was a side project already, and most of the pieces that go into a Linux distribution have reached the point where they’re (mostly) platform-independent—all you need to do is recompile them. It takes fine-tuning, of course, and the actual hardware support takes effort. Yellow Dog Linux started out porting Red Hat to the PowerPC so it would run on Macs, and now builds a solid distribution off of Fedora Core, including a high-end server OS targeted for IBM’s PowerPC servers.

It’ll be interesting to compare upcoming versions of Yellow Dog and Fedora Core now that the latter is working on an actual PPC release.

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