The new Fedora 18 is here! Fortunately for us all, there is a new upgrade utility that will make the transition process for existing installs pretty painless!
Introducing: FedUp!
The FedUp utility is extremely easy to use, and is mostly automated. It allows for pretty seamless upgrading from Fedora 17 to Fedora 18. (Future versions of Fedora should use this as well).
First, install the utility. From the command-line, you can do the following:
$ sudo yum install fedup
Then, run the fedup package to grab the upgrade data from a network image and prep your system. (Replace arch wth your system arch. Either x86_64 or i386):
$ sudo fedup --network 18 --instrepo http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/qa/fedup/f18-RC4/<arch>/
When this finishes, all you need to do is reboot. Grub should automatically boot into the updater, which will display a flashing fedora logo and a progress bar. Let this run for a while (On my system it ran for close to an hour). Once finished, it will simply reboot you into your new OS!
Piece of cake!
NOTES:
There were a few simple caveats to take care of after the upgrade.
- For users using pidgin-conversation-integration for gnome shell, you will need to upgrade the extension.
- Also, Google Chrome stopped working due to a change in version of the udev libraries. The cleanest solution here was to uninstall Chrome, download the newest RPM from google, and reinstall.
