A Fedora User For the Long Haul

A Fedora User For the Long Haul

I am still installing Fedora everywhere I go. I reluctantly switched to RedHat from Slackware a looong time ago (early to mid-90s) when I needed a version to run on a DEC Alpha and couldn't be bothered to simultaneously manage two different distributions on my Alpha versus my PC. Despite many frustrations with the way they try to make Linux behave like Windows, I've grown to appreciate the hard work they do too. And many of the faults actually lie in upstream sources, so I can only blame Fedora for including them...

I never believed in "upgrade" of Linux systems, but rather accepted a periodic reinstall while migrating my home directory data. However, with Fedora I recently discovered, during a business trip, my wife's laptop was running a very stale FC3 and I remotely upgraded it via yum FC3->FC4->FC5 to become fully up to date. (I did this so we could try using ekiga to chat internationally.)

It worked like a charm, right up until it ran out of disk space. However, even then I was able to recover it, clear some space, and finish the upgrade. Note to self: yum upgrade at one point has the old system, all the new downloaded packages, and potentially some of the new package files installed too, it would seem. Needs lots of disk space. I only had to manually search for some really old packages that were orphaned when yum fell over in the middle of a "delete and install" transaction. It is funny how they use the word transaction here...

So, I think it is reasonable to say a real "legacy" strategy for Fedora users is to wait until updates are tapped out in an old distribution, and then upgrade the system to the newer release+updates. By this time, the new release should have most of its bugs patched in the updates stream too. For people who really cannot take this risk of modernity, I agree they probably ought to be running a more conservative distribution like CentOS.

Ironically, the only real problem I've had recently was a bizarre heisenbug on a regular FC5 laptop (not one that had followed such a convoluted upgrade path). With the latest updates a few weeks ago, it began having oom-killer storms in the night correlated with the daily cron jobs. I could not resolve this, and eventually reinstalled from scratch. Problem disappeared. Searching the web gave few hints, and it seems people who encounter this have been using all different distributions and not just Fedora! Search hits are always to someone reporting the issue, getting no resolution, and solving it via frustrated reinstall.