Fedora, going from 3 to 4
Recently I upgraded my main working machine from Fedora Core 3 to Fedora Core 4 using yum. It was actually an easy thing to do, because I found very good instruction from Brandon Hutchinson. However, not everything went smoothly … At first, yum upgrade failed with a message that it cannot resolve a dependency around few packages, libFLAC.so.4 was the cause. As the work around I went to Fedora Core download mirror “near you”, got a package containing file that caused troubles and installed it with --nodeps option.
Impressions: I would call it Fedora 3.5, not Fedora 4… It has many upgraded applications, most noticeable would be Gnome 2.10 and OpenOffice 2.0. With OpenOffice I had an issue: I was running a 2.0 version of OpenOffice already, but when I fired up version shipped with FC4 I discovered that OpenOffice Base lacked 2 pretty important database drives: JDBC and SDBS. (and maybe other too, I didn’t check). So, if anyone needs a database connectivity from OpenOffice, please uninstall Fedora OpenOffice packages. (you do with one line of code sudo nice -n -19 rpm -e $(rpm -qa | grep openoffice)). Then go OpenOffice 2.0 Download page and grab the current build and rpm -Uvh it.
For desktop use I run custom kernels with improved-responsiveness patches from Con Kolivas, so I cannot really tell you what was changed in Fedora kernel since the latest FC3 kernel release.
By the way, I discovered a segfault bug in vmstat utility. You can reproduce this bug by trying to check block IO on any LVM-based partition.
vmstat -p /dev/VolumeGroup/LogicalVolume
Other than that everything looks fine. Thank you Fedora!
PS: I’m writing this after I came back from a presentation that Warren Togami (the guy who actually started Fedora project in the first place ) gave at US LUG (USC = University of Southern California, LUG = Linux Users Groups). It was actually a very nice presentation, at the end some people got cool little things from RedHat, including RedHat-branded bottles of water with a sign “Free as in Water” and one lucky guy got theat famost red hat! . Thank you Warren and Thank you Red Hat!
