Well, the upgrade is done, and while there didn’t seem to be any unrecoverable issues, I can also say that I’m less than impressed with how the upgrade recognized the system after I ran the install DVD. However, I am also more than willing to give excuses given that I tend to munge up my configuration quite frequently, which likely broke some valid assumptions that were made during the installation/upgrade process.
The issues I encountered included the following:
- The upgrade process itself took exceptionally long because it appears to have re-installed virtually every package that I had installed, whether it actually needed the upgrade or not.
- After I was done with the upgrade, the first time I ran yum update, once again, nearly every package I had installed outside of the original install was marked to be updated – and we’re talkin’ over 1.3GB of software that was redownloaded & installed! My intention for upgrading via the DVD was to actually avoid hitting the software repositories on what would otherwise be a very heavily-loaded day for them, given the new release and all.
- After running yum (see above) and rebooting, X didn’t start. However, this could be my fault, because I previously attempted to run vncserver remotely, and on display 0, no less (just to see what would happen). When I restarted after running yum, it appears there was a temporarily file that wasn’t cleared, so X couldn’t load into display 0 – which is why I think this particular error was really due to me, and not the upgrade. However, I do think X could benefit from the added intelligence of knowing whether or not it’s already running on a display by means other than the existence of a simple temporarily file…(I also know I’ve greatly over simplified why this happened, but it’s not much more complex than this…)
- Finally, once I got X running after the reboot, the display was significantly slower – and sure enough, the display drivers had reverted back the generic VESA default. I switched to fglrx, and that at least recognized the right refresh rate and boosted the draw speed, but I think I still have to run aticonfig at least once to get things working the way they were before. This is the cost of running proprietary binaries, I admit, but the free ones don’t accelerate much of anything on my video card (ATi Radeon 1600X Pro AGP), so I go to Livna for help…
That’s the gist of it. However, as I said at the beginning, it is very likely that a lot of the problems are related either to my own adventurous nature (X not starting) or my insistence to run some non-free software (ATi display drivers). The desynchronization between what was installed and what was on the repository, however, seems to me to be an unnecessary waste of time, bandwidth, & resources, and I cannot imagine resolving it would be terribly complex. If someone has some thoughts on this issue, by all means, please share them with me!