michaeldehaan.net

So I (finally) just upgraded my F8 laptop to F9 using the DVD, after having it be ok on various server installs for a while. I was waiting for some stuff to get ironed out after seeing friends have problems with their laptop installs/upgrades and hearing it seemed to be a general theme. Well, they are right, it’s a general theme.

Install seems to go fine, but then I get some nice 1-time traceback errors from packagekit. Yum clean all seems to fix them (after having to also kill some background daemon that has a lock on yum, which is odd because I didn’t start any GUI stuff yet), and I proceed to upgrade the universe, some 1000 packages. So far so good…

I was using KDE before, but I start it to find it’s been replaced with KDE4 and my icons are all screwy (it looks find of playschool even), so I decide to bite the bullet and switch back to GNOME, hoping my keymap problems I had with GNOME (that made me use XFCE/KDE) over the past few releases are fixed. Heck, I might enable gdb and switch my runlevel to 5, I’m a team player

I start GNOME to find that GNOME is rather screwed up, white background, nautilus can’t start for some reason, mentioning Bonobo. (Bonobos are very promiscuous apes that are smarter than chimps, just an FYI — I’m not sure why I should be concerned). When I reboot, I find that GRUB’s config is also screwed up. It just says “GRUB”, no boot loader. Switching to rescue mode and running grub-install /dev/sda didn’t fix it, I could fix all of this but I think I’ll just format everything and just save /home. It’s time to clean things off. I probably could fix all of these things seperately in a half day or so (maybe), but sloth wins.

So far, this is the worst Fedora upgrade I’ve experienced. No one in particular is to blame here, but seriously, yikes. Perhaps this is what happens when your laptop has been continuously upgraded from FC5, so I’ll truck on and see about doing a clean install.

For a regular user who does not want to endure this, I think this upgrade experience gets an F. Let’s try harder next time and lean just a bit more towards ‘stable’ than ‘bleeding’ … rawhide is perhaps good for that. This is kind of why I like the Debian model of testing/unstable/experimental and never actually having to do upgrades (in theory).

Anyhow, I still love Fedora, and I’ll get this laptop repaired eventually. Ugh though. Seriously, ugh.

Not really trying to complain (ok, I am), but in terms of Paul’s “lower the barriers to entry” speech, this is one.