Fedora strikes back
FC5 was released two days ago. Since I was sick of wasting upwards of 2 hours upgrading via the CD/DVD, I decided to try the 'unsupported' live upgrade method. This basically means upgrading with yum from within the OS so that downtime is minimized to the reboot into the new kernel. I've finished 3 systems at this point. The first was an x86_64 box that was actually running FC5-test releases that were upgraded as new RPMs came out. So that one was kinda cheating. The other two are x86 boxes. The first upgrade went fairly smoothly, although I discovered that I needed to uninstall all FC4 kernel RPMs older than 2.6.14 first. The 2nd system was somewhat more painful, primarily because most of the 3rd party yum repositories (livna, dries, dag, fedora-netdev) haven't rebased to FC5 yet, so they all bombed out, requiring me to disable them. Also, the FC mirror servers are still getting hammered so just pulling down the package headers took several hours. The end result though seems to be turning out ok. Here's my condensed process (your mileage may vary):
* If you're going to be upgrading more than one system, to save time, its best to download the DVD image for FC5, and then copy all of its RPMs into /var/cache/yum/core/packages.
* First manually upgrade the fedora-release RPM
* Then do "yum update yum" to get the new version of yum upgraded
* Now for the long part. Run "yum update" and be prepared for anywhere from 2 to 7 hours of waiting. Since all the mirrors are overloaded, plus some seem to still be lagging in getting all the FC5 packages, there will be a ton of timeouts, 404 errors, and generally slow downloads of the package headers. However, once this finishes, you should be all set to reboot into the new '2054' FC5 kernel.
And yes, Ubuntu really does suck.