Upgrading from a previous Fedora

One of the great new features is to be able to do a live upgrade from an older Fedora release to Fedora 9. You simply have to install the new package called preupgrade and run the program as root:

# yum -y install preupgrade
# preupgrade

This process does take a LONG TIME, requires a high speed internet connection and has a couple minor gotchas but so far I've done a couple upgrades with no data loss and pretty much everything has "just worked" afterwards. You don't need to download and burn any ISOs as the upgrade is done on top of your current installation.

After the preupgrade script downloads a ton of packages it will reboot and begin the upgrade procedure automatically. Follow the instructions and after the upgrade is complete log back in and you'll have to fix a couple little things. One things is that you'll need to update the Livna repository file below and then clear the yum cache. Once you do that you'll have to do an update again and this time yum will automatically update any extra software you had installed from Livna with the previous version.

# rpm -Uhv http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-9.rpm
# yum clean all
# yum -y update

This too will take a while since it's likely that dozens of packages will need to be updated. Once it's done it's a good idea to reboot again for good measure and if all goes well you should be done!