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Upgrading Fedora via Yum

I find that it is a big waste to download 5GB of CDs just to change a little ‘4′ to a ‘5′. Instead, I simply upgrade my Fedora Core installs using Yum. It isn’t always as easy though. First of all, don’t use Smart. It is not stable enough to be used for resolving so many dependencies (in upwards of 200) without taking forever along with a few gigs of swap space. First, you need to officially change your release version. Download the latest fedora-release package from http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core//i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/. Install it with rpm -Uvh <file>. Notice anything different? You should. You are officially running the next version of Fedora Core. Feels good, doesn’t it? However, you only incremented the number by one. Nothing else. Next, you need to upgrade everything with yum. Don’t use the update command. Upgrade enables obsolete package processing, which removes unneeded packages to save space and resolve dependencies. Update merely upgrades all your packages without removing old stuff. Once all that is done, I recommend running your normal package manager (smart, apt, etc) to update your system. This will catch anything that yum might have messed up that your normal system already maintains. If you are feeling balsy, you can simply upgrade your package manager with yum, and then update the configuration files so that you can use it to do the full distro upgrade.

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