Fedora 13 (“Goddard”) was released today.
I wouldn’t normally go upgrading my OS to the latest on the day of release, but frankly anyone who runs Fedora is an early adopter by definition.
I started by upgrading two unimportant Fedora 12 virtual machines at work using preupgrade. One went smoothly but the other failed because the /boot partition was too full. I cleared out all old kernels and tried again, with success. Each upgrade took less than an hour, I think, but I wasn’t really paying attention.
After brief testing to make sure all the important stuff had upgraded properly, I upgraded my work desktop PC, my home PC and my laptop too. They were all on Fedora 12 and the upgrades went without a hitch. I’m very impressed.
Massive thanks and kudos are due to the Fedora team for working so hard to get this release out and for providing such an easy upgrade path. I look forward to getting stuck into the new features of this release in time.
My next task is to upgrade my home server, which is currently running Fedora 11. Updates for Fedora (N-2) are only available for one month after the release of Fedora N, so time is now of the essence if I wish to keep my server secure. Unfortunately the reason I’m still on 11 is because the upgrade to 12 failed and I wasn’t able to get it working. I will probably take this opportunity to do a complete wipe and reinstall (scary!). Then I can also migrate from i386 architecture to x86_64.
Watch this space!
Jonathan Gazeley 
I tried the preupgrade route once and it didn’t work out for me. I think the problem comes if you have lots of self-built and third-party packages. I just use the procedure documented at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq
I think I’ve done 10->11 and 11->12 this way so far, with no significant troubles.
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I’ve hardly ever had problems with preupgrade. On the one occasion that I did, I decided to wipe and reinstall, basically taking a tarball of the /etc tree, a list of yum repos, and a text file listing all installed packages.
Then rebuilding a machine is a case of doing a bare OS install, adding the repos back, doing a huge “yum install” of everything from the package list, and then untarring the /etc tree and rebooting. Simple!
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