Fedora Core 5 Delayed

According to the Fedora-testing mailing list, Fedora Core 5 will be delayed till March 20.

Due to circumstances outside of our control, we’re going to be unable to keep to the scheduled date of March 15th for the release of FC5 and instead are going to have to make the release date Monday, March 20th. While unfortunate in some ways, this gives us the opportunity to pull in the final GNOME 2.14 tarballs which should be available on Monday assuming the changes are suitably minor.

Jeremy Katz

This is nothing too surprising and seeing as this is only 5 days, there is plenty of time for some finalizing improvements. Gnome 2.14 will be available Marth 15 and since the 2.13.4 beta is already in FC5-test3 I don’t imagine there will be drastic changes (although Gnome developers are a odd bunch).

This gives me more time to prepare for this release as well. My preliminary Personal Fedora Core 5 Installation Guide has been public for a few days now (comments appreciated).

Posted in: Distributions, FC5, Fedora,

6 Comments:

• rjbond3rd on March 14, 2006 - 09:21 PM

  Hi Mauriat,
  
  Your FC5 guide looks good to me (I got FC5 RC3 running using your FC4 guide).
  
  I have a dumb question. With a Debian-type distro, it’s possible (using the apt package manager) to do a “dist upgrade”. I’m wondering if it’s possible to upgrade FC5 RC3 to the final FC5 by doing a “yum update”.
  
  My instincts say probably not, because in the past, it’s been recommended to wipe out any release candidate install and do a clean install with the final release. But if one upgrades /every single package/, wouldn’t that be equivalent to wiping out my FC5 RC3 install and doing a clean FC5 install?
  
  Just wondering…

• Mauriat on March 14, 2006 - 10:22 PM

  rjbond3rd: Well technically it is possible, but “every single package” is misleading. Often packages change names or can be split up, merged or removed. You would potentially have a very odd “state” that wouldn’t be reproduceable unless you went from a test release to a final release.
  
  The test releases are meant JUST for that, testing. Hence they are not very suitable for upgrading, since the upgrade should be from FC4 to FC5. In the end, every single upgrade I’ve ever done in the past has been screwy with some left overs that have misbehaved. So I do a full re-install with every release and re-learn everything everytime. :-P That’s why it is VERY good to have a separate huge /home where you have everything stored.

• Mauriat on March 18, 2006 - 07:19 PM

  Fred: I agree with you completely. But what you’re seeing is actually a problem that will always occur when you merging softwares written by countless unique groups/persons/companies etc. MS can control almost everything about their system and since they’re obligated to support upgrades, then they will! This is the “price” you pay with open source software of this nature. Please don’t think it is Fedora’s “fault”. For example, different versions of Gnome require significant changes, that is very difficult to support upgrades between Gnome 2.6, 2.8, 2.10 or 2.12 when going to 2.14. There’s no guarantee all the components remain the same!
  
  As for FC5, I would probably recommend a clean install, but that’s my opinion. Why not try first with an “upgrade” and if it has problems, then clean install. It’s a gamble, I know.
  
  There are alternatives, however. Suse is a commercial DESKTOP distribution that has an incredibly comprehensive installer. OR, you can even upgrade LESS frequently: FC1 -> FC3 -> FC5.
  
  In any event, I truly hope there will be a better solution, but since no one invests the time into it and since the cost vs. benefit is too high, it probably will never happen. I hope I’m wrong.

• Fred Beondo on March 18, 2006 - 04:16 PM

  I thought one of the design goals for FC5 was for it to finally be possible to upgrade from previous versions of Fedora WITHOUT the mess versions up to FC4 make of your system. Having to install from scratch each time a new version comes out is insane. I am a MSWindows hater but one thing they do right is being able to upgrade without the mess. True, some obsolete programs might need upgrading or, at worst, doing without and some hardware might also be obsoleted but the upgrade path works. Is FC5 going to be the same pain insofar as having to do a clean install?
  There are definitely improvements with each release but one of them hasn’t been a workable upgrade path. It takes me about 24hours of work to get things just the way I want them every time I install Fedora. Compiling programs that are not part of the distribution and finding all the dependencies is very often NOT a picnic and consumes most of that time. Compared to an upgrade that WORKS, it sucks!

• Fred Beondo on March 20, 2006 - 10:10 AM

  Understood. And upgrading less often IS exactly what I do in addition to being semi-fanatical about having hot spares and backups on optical media. I will generally try the upgrade approach more out of curiousity rather than a touching faith that it’s actually going to not foul up a perfectly functioning system. FC1 to FC2 didn’t work well as upgrades go so I just restored my system and waited for FC3 which is what I still run. FC4 seemed, according to some owners of compaq and hp notebooks (as one of mine is) to be MADE for those pcs because of native device support (hp modified touchpads and wide aspect screens specifically). I still have FC3 loaded on that one anyway. Hey, no matter how much of a pain it can sometimes be to install and/or upgrade, it’s just not enough to drive me back to MS after 12 years. I’m somewhat masochistic I suppose but I enjoy a challenge at times.

• MI4C on May 4, 2006 - 07:07 AM

  I had to upgrade from FC3 to FC4 through yum, everything seemed to work fine. Now I upgraded FC4 to FC5 everything just screw up now.
  
  I have weird problems with glibc and shared libraries.