How To Upgrade From Fedora 15 To Fedora 16 (Desktop & Server)

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Author: Falko Timme <ft [at] falkotimme [dot] com>
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Last edited 11/08/2011

This article describes how you can upgrade your Fedora 15 system to Fedora 16. The upgrade procedure works for both desktop and server installations.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

The commands in this article must be executed with root privileges. Open a terminal (on a Fedora 15 desktop, go to Applications > System Tools > Terminal) and log in as root, or if you log in with a regular user, type

su

to become root.

Please make sure that the system that you want to upgrade has more than 600 MB of RAM - otherwise the system might hang when it tries to reboot with the following message (leaving you with an unusable system):

Trying to unpack rootfs image as initramfs...

2 Upgrading To Fedora 16 (Desktop)

First we must upgrade the rpm package:

yum update rpm

Then we install the latest updates:

yum -y update

Next we clean the yum cache:

yum clean all

If you notice that a new kernel got installed during yum -y update, you should reboot the system now:

reboot

(After the reboot, log in as root again, either directly or with the help of

su

)

Now we come to the upgrade process. We can do this with preupgrade (preupgrade will also take care of your RPMFusion packages).

Install preupgrade...

yum install preupgrade

... and call it like this:

preupgrade

The preupgrade wizard will then start on your desktop. Select Fedora 16 (Verne). Afterwards the system is being prepared for the upgrade.

At the end, click on the Reboot Now button.

During the reboot, the upgrade is being performed. This can take quite a long time, so please be patient.

Afterwards, you can log into your new Fedora 16 desktop.

3 Upgrading To Fedora 16 (Server)

First we must upgrade the rpm package:

yum update rpm

Then we install the latest updates:

yum -y update

Next we clean the yum cache:

yum clean all

If you notice that a new kernel got installed during yum -y update, you should reboot the system now:

reboot

(After the reboot, log in as root again, either directly or with the help of

su

)

Now we come to the upgrade process. We can do this with preupgrade.

Install preupgrade...

yum install preupgrade

... and call it like this:

preupgrade-cli

It will show you a list of releases that you can upgrade to. If all goes well, it should show something like Fedora 16 (Verne) in the list:

[root@server1 ~]# preupgrade-cli
Loaded plugins: blacklist, langpacks, whiteout
No plugin match for: rpm-warm-cache
No plugin match for: remove-with-leaves
No plugin match for: auto-update-debuginfo
Loaded plugins: langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit
please give a release to try to pre-upgrade to
valid entries include:
   "Fedora 16 (Verne)"
[root@server1 ~]#

To upgrade, append the release string to the preupgrade-cli command:

preupgrade-cli "Fedora 16 (Verne)"

Preupgrade will also take care of your RPMFusion packages, so all you have to do after preupgrade has finished is to reboot:

reboot

During the reboot, the upgrade is being performed. This can take quite a long time, so please be patient. Afterwards, you can log into your new Fedora 16 server.

4 Links

• Fedora: http://fedoraproject.org/