I followed Carson McDonald's knowledgeable lead and updated my fedora 7 install to Fedora 8 with yum. Others have reported problems doing this, but it worked perfectly for me, albeit taking a bit of time. Updating was right for me I think as I had previously installed F7 from scratch and had later installed many packages from the livna and fedora repositories. So it was handy to be able to update everything in one operation. The stats and notes for the yum update on my laptop were:
download1.0 GB
packages1218
processing20 mins
installing65 mins
cleanup25 mins
  • If you put your yum cache on a separate disk to one being installed to (even a USB hard disk), then things would probably proceed much more quickly. See /etc/yum.conf
  • I have my yum cache on a separate partition to my relatively small root partition that I was updating. However I still needed around 810MB of temp space on /, which was used during the update (in addition to the 160MB of extra space used by Fedora 8).
  • yum seems to disable suspend during the update, so don't think you can Ctrlz the yum window, suspend and resume later.
Right, so after 2 hours 5 days use, here is my review compared to Fedora 7. In summary a lot of effort has gone into this release, and it really does look very polished.

The good

The bad

The ugly

© Nov 10 2007