Upgrading Fedora - Notes

A few notes on upgrading Fedora installations.

Fresh Install 

Probably the safest way to get a working upgrade is to back up any home directories or important configurations and go with a fresh installation.

Upgrades often leave undesirable configurations in home directories (GNOME configs, for example).  This often leads to strange desktop / display issues that can't easily by found or fixed.

You are not using OSX here.   Migrating settings and applications may or may not work.  :)

1. Create a USB Stick

On Fedora 19, these instructions didn't work for me.   Here is what I ended up doing.  Get a USB stick that doesn't have anything important on it.

1. Download the ISO image.
2. Insert the USB stick.
3. Start the Disks application and select the USB drive in the left panel. 
4. Unmount the USB disk filesystem if it is mounted. 
5. Up at the top of the right panel, click on the gear icon and select Restore Disk Image.
6. Select the downloaded ISO image file, and click Start Restoring.... 

2. Boot using the USB Stick, complete the installation

Shut down the machine, and re-start.   If you need to, use the BIOS to select the USB as the boot drive. 

Go through the install process.   Best to dedicate a HDD to the install, that way you can boot from that drive via BIOS boot selector if you want multiple OS's on your computer without too much hassle.   In my case, I've got a dual boot workstation, with a HDD dedicated to booting Linux.   I use the BIOS boot drive selector to boot up Fedora instead of WinDoze. 

NOTE: I've found that EZbcd doesn't play nice with UEFI boot partitions that Fedora 20 installs.    Best to just use the BIOS to select a boot disk.

 

 

 

Using FedUp

WARNING, THIS DOESN'T ALWAYS WORK.   Almost every time I've done this, there were some strange after-effects with GNome at least.

For newer versions of Fedora (newer than 17), FedUp with the network upgrade is the way to go:

$ sudo yum install fedup
$ sudo yum update fedup fedora-release
$ sudo fedup --network 20

Where 20 is the version you want to upgrade to.  Fedup will automatically reboot the system when it's done downloading everything.


The Fedora site says: "Prior to Fedora 17, the DVD/ISO/USB Drive option is recommended."

Yeah, well... what they really mean is, that FedUp will probably get you something that boots and runs some things, but you may discover later on that many settings are just plain broken.

MySQL - Making Snapshots and Loading Snapshots

Just a quick note on how to make database snapshots with MySQL.

Create a compressed snapshot:

$ mysqldump --single-transaction -udbuser -pdbpass somedb | bzip2 > somedb.sql.bz2

• The --single-transaction option can be left out if you are not using InnoDB.
• In newer versions of MySQL/Moriadb, --opt is the default, so there's no need to specify it.

Load a compressed snapshot:

$ bunzip2 -c somedb.sql.bz2 | mysql -u dbuser -pdbpass somedb 

These commands are usually best done as a background job, as they can take some time to complete. Also, they may cause long delays for any applications using the database, so it's a good idea to shut the application servers down before creating a snapshot.