I upgraded my Fedora 7 installation to Fedora 8 (werewolf) on my Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop this weekend. Surprisingly it was not as smooth as I would have liked it to be. Nevertheless I made a successful upgrade.

After completing the necessary steps for the upgrade process, I booted my laptop with the Fedora 8 DVD to realize that the DVD wouldn't boot. I did not even get to the point where I can check the consistency of the media. This may have been due to a bad image but instead of using another DVD image, I used the Fedora 8 Live (GNOME) for the upgrade process. This was the first time I have ever done an upgrade from a live CD and in fact I wasn't even sure if such a process a possible. Still I went ahead and tried.

Live CD booted into Fedora 8 flawlessly. From the live CD I started the Fedora 8 upgrade process. The following screen shots show the upgrade process.

[bg|screenshots/Fedora8]

Since I wanted to have my /home partition intact, I formatted all other partitions except the /home partition. By doing this all the user settings, preferences, emails etc. were preserved after the upgrade process. Unlike the DVD install, the live cd installer didn't allow customization of the software being installed. I guess all the software that were in live cd were installed by default.

Within a few minutes the installation was complete and I was asked to restart the computer. After restarting I was taken through another set of installation process which lead me to the license information, Firewall settings, SELinux, user settings etc. When I came to the ``Create User'' part of the installation process, I created the same user (aravind) as Fedora 7 installation since I had all my user data and settings in /home/aravind partition. With that, the installation was complete and I was ready to log into Fedora 8.

The first thing I noticed when I logged in was that I did not see my default background. Taking a a closer look at the filesystem I realized that my whole root directory / including /home was in a single partition. Only then I realized that I forgot to mount /home as a separate partition when I partitioned the filesystem during the upgrade process.

I went back, repeated all the steps of the upgrade process with the live cd. This time when I restarted from the live system, I was taken directly to the GDM rather than the second set of installation (user setting, firewall SELinux etc). I did not see my user name in the GDM menu. Realizing something was wrong, I logged in as root. A quick look at the users setting (System - Administration - Users and Groups) revealed that no users were present. So I created a user named aravind with home directory located at /home/aravind. When I went back to GDM I was able to see my user name and as expected I saw my default background when I logged in.

Everything seemed ok (all my setting and data were intact). So i fired pirut to install other software which I frequently used. Pirut usage was frequently interrupted by a known crash. It was annoying. Finally I was able to get everything installed.

I really haven't had to chance to play with all the latest features of Fedora 8. I will probably come up with a review of how it works in the next couple of weeks. But so far it works well (I wouldn't say flawlessly). I am sure you would have read a lot of great reviews about Fedora 8 but I think you should read this blog from Dvorak.org/blog titled ``Does Fedora 8 deserve Intellectual Welfare?''.