fedora-penguin

Linux Fedora 20 was released earlier this week and the operating system updates on all but one server went the smoothest, fastest and with the least issues ever.

The standard process to update from Fedora 19 was:
login as root
ensure all is uptodate: yum update
install fedup: yum install fedup
run fedup with network updates: fedup –network 20
about 10 minutes later it has downloaded all of the update packages and is ready to restart.
reboot; automatically chooses fedup upgrade and starts installing.
About 60 minutes later, give or take, it is done, restarts and all is working!

In the past there were all kinds of incompatibility issues that needed a lot of manual resolution, but not this one.

So, three server upgrades went this way, two dual-booting laptops and a couple of new installs.

The one that did not work out was more of an issue with the kernel moving from v3.11.9 to 3.11.10. Something to do with Logical Volume Management and the inability to mount the / partition. Never did like LVMs. Will probably copy the configuration data, and reformat/reinstall from scratch using standard partitions.

The last installation of Fedora 20 went onto a solid state SSD drive.
It was a Kingston Digital 120GB SSDNow V300 SATA 3
SSD and the install went a little faster than a spinning drive, but this was installed from a DVD disk.
The wonderful part was the startup time. Typically Fedora 19 would go from powerup to login in anywhere from 60-90 seconds, depending on the hardware, etc.
The testbed machine is a:
ibm S51 intel pentium4 @3.2GHz (2x1GB ddr 400 -184pin)
Startup time from powerup to login: 10 seconds!
Wow!
I really like these SSDs! If only they would drop in price some more. This was was about $130 on sale for $80, a smaller 64GB drive was about $100.