Fedora Core 3...

Back when Fedora Core 2 was released, I said that it would not be long before I upgraded to SuSE instead. Well, it never happened, and today, as Fedora Core 3, I am again upgrading it. This time I am also waiting for my shipment of SuSE Linux Pro 9.2, which was also released recently, but we'll see how that transition goes.

I have to say that I was a little nervous about upgrading this time. There seems to be a lot of little changes in the distribution that the average user could overlook, but nothing like the changes in Fedora Core 2, and SuSE 9.2 is similar in this regard also. But this makes the upgrade more interesting, since this sorta minimizes the differences. But the part that really concerned me is that for a while, the latest and greatest Fedora kernels would not boot on my machine, as reported here. Unfortunately no provided any input on this issue, so I was a little concerned as to whether the kernel would boot or not. Of course, I was not prepared for the worst case scenarios :-).

I snagged the CD's via BitTorrent, burnt them on CD's, and got to work. I started the installer, and it recognized my system; I clicked OK to continue, and then realized that I hadn't modified my /etc/fstab to disregard my software RAID, and because of this, it forced me to reboot, and I had to boot back into Fedora, update the file, and restart the process all over again.

Once that the process started going, it went fairly smooth. The upgrade took around 90 minutes; again, it started by stating 60 minutes, and it kept growing by 5 minutes for about 15 minutes. The only user interaction, however, was to change CD's, and the first CD was there for a very long time on my system.

After the process was completed, I rebooted. When I got to the Grub screen, I was expecting to see my old kernel and the new kernel, however, I only saw the new kernel, and I got a bit nervous, but pressed enter, and viola! It booted! I was pretty happy at this point. Almost everything worked out of the box, except for the services that depended on my software RAID, which I'll get to in a second. The core operating system, however, does not seem to have been updated very much, and still seems very texty compared to SuSE.

For the software RAID, however, it seems different than it was in Fedora Core 2. One of the first things I did with the machine was to uncomment my software RAID mount point in the /etc/fstab, but when I went to mount it, it complained that it couldn't and that my superblock was corrupted. My heart started to palpatate. I thought that perhaps a module was not loaded, so I looked around quickly, and then I remembered about raidstart, so I started up my RAID via raidstart /dev/md0, and after this, I was able to mount my filesystem.

But why wasn't this done for me automatically? Well, according to the Linux RAID HOWTO, this is only done if the /etc/fstab file contains a reference to an md device. To test it, I rebooted, and everything came up nicely!

There are many updates that were released today, and unfortunately, the mirrors are not yet updated completely yet, so snagging the updates may take a bit longer. But overall, the machine seems like it did before. I am sure that there will be a few quirks as I play with it some more, but so far so good.