Fedora 11 was released this past week and I’ve already downloaded the various netinst and DVD ISO images for both 32bit and 64bit systems at home.  I’ve got 5 computers to upgrade: 1 development server, 1 MythTV server, my desktop, 1 Myth client and my laptop.   Since I’ve now got a nice quad-core in my office at home, I can start the upgrade process with the Acer laptop.

The first thing to do when starting the upgrade process is to review the release notes.  Most of the time there aren’t any major issues you’ll need to worry about when groing from Fedora X to Fedora X+1, but that may change if you’ve skipped a couple of releases.  I try to avoid that these days, but I did once go from Fedora 7 to Fedora 10.  This is another reason I never upgrade releases but actually reinstall each release.  See my Everyday Guide for Fedora Upgrades for dealing with that process.

Some of the things I found in the release notes that are of interest to me are:

• PulseAudio is reported to be more tightly integrated with the rest of the system.  Or vice-versa.  Pulse Audio has been a pain the butt to me so far.  But we’ll see how this situation has changed wtih F11.
• EXT4 is now the default filesystem.  That means the root filesystem will use EXT4 when I reinstall.  But I doubt there is anyway to get the EXT4 features on an existing filesystem.  Since I have no intention of pulling all that data off the system just to get a new filesystem, EXT4 won’t help me with day to day data (outside of the OS files) for some time.
• MinGW is now included as a development tool.  This doesn’t mean that much to me at home since I couldn’t care less if my applications run on Windows.  But I have to work with JNI (Java Native Interface) code at work and having MinGW on my F11 installation means I don’t have to set up a development environment under Windows.  I just have to test under Windows.  Well, its as close as I can come to ignoring Windows while still having to support it.
• Anaconda doesn’t allow changing disk partition sizes in text mode.  Say what?!?!  So anyone with nVidia cards that are misbehaving may be screwed.  Hmmm.  Well, supposedly the boot time graphic card support is better with F11 too so maybe this won’t be as big an issue as it used to be.  I know I need custom layouts and apparently only the graphical install will allow this now.  We’ll see.
• Root logins are still disabled, but at least now there is some info provided how to get around this restriction.
• PolicyKit has more control over printers.  I really hate PolicyKit.  It gets in my way.  I am the only user on these boxes.  Can’t I just disable the damn thing?
• There is a wordpress RPM but I would never it.  It’s far too easy to install manually and that makes it very easy to test new configurations before taking them live.
• Here’s an important one.  The X.org project is apparently disabling the Ctrl-Alt-Backspace keystroke to kill the X server.  Fortunately, you can easily fix this with minor edits to the xorg.conf file.  Apparently they did this because braindead emacs users couldn’t find the right keystrokes in their editor. Bunch o’ dorks.
• gcc has been rev’d to 4.4.  Not sure if that will require any changes on my end, especially since I’ve been doing mostly (yuck) Java programming at work.  Of course this change comes with a warning that syntax changes may break things.
• Oh oh.  DBus permissions have been tightened.  Anytime they do something like that I find something that doesn’t work like it used to.  I wonder what it will be this time….
• Meld has been updated but I don’t see any functional improvements in the feature list.  Even so, if you don’t use Meld and your a programmer you should consider it.  It’s quite handy, especially if you’re like me and don’t rely on pansy-ass IDEs.
• Netbeans and Eclipse have been updated.  Not that I care.  I write Java with vi and cscope.
• Some interesting embedded support for Atmel and AVR parts.  We might like that at work.

I didn’t notice any mention of RPMFusion in the release notes.  It seems to be alive and has packages for F11.  So I guess they’re just not encouraging use of non-free codecs.  I also missed any reference to the intel driver updates.  I know that the intel graphics chips were the first to be ported to the latest X.org release using a new architecture that relies on some kernel updates.  Well, nows the time to put all those together and see if the intel driver has gotten any better at supporting multiple displays.  Personally, I don’t need this anymore.  My desktop uses an nVidia GeForce 8200 and has dual monitors.  My laptop has the intel chip, but I can always test the driver by using the extra LCD I have.  I may do that, if time permits.

Update: 2009-06-13 9:27pm

Most of the initial installation is going well on the laptop.  I’m using the Anaconda options from my notes on Migrating a MythTV server to F10.  I got to the point of custom partitioning and decided to use EXT4 for the root partition.  Turns out boot partitions cannot be on EXT4.  So I’m back to EXT3.  So much for experiencing the benefits of the new filesystem.

The selection of repositories is kinda weird.  They offer the installation repo (the DVD) along with i386 and i386-updates repos.  Clicking on those i386 repos just gives an error.  If they don’t work they should probably be removed.  Maybe its how I specified the anaconda options.  Maybe doing the install via an nfsiso repository mucks this up.

I’m doing a custom installation.  The units package is gone from Engineering and Scientific collection of the Applications packages.  It might be somewhere else.  I didn’t use this much, but its a nice tool to have around.

One thing that annoys me with the custom package selection is being forced to enable a collection in order to see what’s in it.  Why can’t I just see the list without having to enable anything first?

Installation has started.  Wait a awhile, then check back to see if my Acer laptop runs better or worse.

Update: 2009-06-14 3:20pm

Mauriat already has his F11 guide available.  Be sure to check that out for help on getting everything running.

Wireless networking still isn’t working right.  For some reason I can’t get the route automatically added for the wireless connection.  So I have to do it manually.

There are some loud clicks on my desktop session.  I have all desktop audio effects disabled so I’m not sure what’s causing that.

Everything else seems to be up and running at the moment.  I haven’t checked all features, like video.  But the basic system is running and I can access sudo from my user.  That means I can fix whatever is broken from that user.  I didn’t notice that sudo hangs if the network is not properly configured.  I really hate applications that hang because the network is not working even though the application is not doing anything on the network.  Ugh.

I am installing the fastmirror plugin for yum but will not install the presto plugin.  I need my systems in production mode (from my point of view) and will wait till others decide on the reliability of partial file transfers for package updates.

Overall, the process for reinstallation probably only took about 2-3 hours, tops.  And that’s with lots of breaks and distractions, plus the initial installation which was about 20-30 minutes of unattended processing.  It’s become pretty painless.  Total disk usage is about 5.2G on the root partition for installed packages, including a bunch of development stuff.  Not bad.  Leaves me with over 4G for additional Fedora managed apps.

Update: 2009-06-19 11:02am

I should note that after many releases of disabling it because it didn’t work, NetworkManager is now my preferred way to use wifi hotspots.  I tried it with F11 and was able to quickly and painlessly (sans my collection of shell scripts) login at a local Panera.  So I would recommend leaving NetworkManager enabled now if you use your laptop at wifi hotspots.