Yes, it’s that time again, time to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of Fedora. A co-worker brought in the Fedora 11 DVD. I don’t like doing upgrades on my work box on company time (especially since I’m pushing by privileges by using Fedora at work), so brought the DVD home and started on the laptop here first. I was hoping for a quick install and then head over to work on my night off last night to do that one as well. That didn’t happen for multiple reasons.

I still don’t trust the built-in upgrader, so once again we backed everything up and went for a clean install. I started it around 8pm and didn’t finish the main install until about 2am. Now, part of that is that I found a ton of new packages that I want to play with, so the install took a lot longer than normal (little sister Brittany will be jealous to know Stellarium was one of those available in the default install). I would still like to see that sped up. However, I may also be running up against hardware issues. I think this laptop is now almost 6 years old. But aside from the install, with Fedora she runs pretty quick. I don’t care how great Windows 7 is (we’re not even going to talk about it predecessor) it will never run smoothly on this machine.

As usual, things just keep getting better and better. The only problem I’ve had so far was a popup warning about a lock on NFS. I think that was due to me transferring all my files (including the hidden ones) to this machine. But after a restart that too is gone. And all the Fedora 10 guides for getting your favourite extras worked just fine for 11. As usual I spent too much time last night playing with it.

Now I know Linux still isn’t for everyone, so for all you lucky son-of a-guns still on Windows, this is my tribute to you:

Software installation in Linux is difficult