A few minutes I excitedly opened up the preupgrade program on my web server (this system) and downloaded all of the metadata and packages necessary to update. I know, I know, a beta on a running “server” isn’t a good idea, but oh well. What followed was kind of a disaster …
Before this, I downloaded Fedora 15 Beta and installed it using VirtualBox in my Windows 7 system. Worked okay, as long as I upped the memory to 1GB from the default 512MB VirtualBox allocates for a new VM. Sadly I didn’t make the connection that the same thing might happen if I ran preupgrade on the web server, which also only has 512MB of physical memory.
Needless to say, after rebooting and attempting the actual upgrade on my web server, the kernel bombed the same way it did when I didn’t give it enough memory in VirtualBox.
Strange bug, it is. Next step is to try preupgrade on my system in the living room, it has 2GB. If it succeeds, which I’m guessing it will, it seems I’m stuck to updating by CD (no DVD on the GX260) on the web server.
Update: The upgrade went okay on the livingroom system, but F15 has some other bugs to work out still. First thing I noticed was that the display didn’t automatically scale correctly, leaving a black box around the plymouth startup screen. Which, by the way, didn’t have all the fancy effects I had previously setup (the “Solar” startup, like in the YouTube clip below). It actually didn’t boot at all into run level 5 (graphical), but worked fine when I forced it to run level 3 instead. At that point I tried a yum update, but of course the RPM Fusion repos I had setup were now broken.
Long story short (tl;dr), don’t get too excited about Fedora 15 quite yet, there are still some bugs to work out.
