This morning, I’m doing an upgrade of my main workhorse laptop from Fedora 12 to what will soon be Fedora 13 Alpha. I may not be using the method that most people use for such an upgrade. Here’s how I’m doing it:
- I have a mirror of fedora/linux/development/13/x86_64/os on a workstation, which is connected via Ethernet cable to the same router as my laptop, and is offering that directory tree over HTTP.
- From that area, I copied isolinux/vmlinuz and isolinux/initrd.img to my laptop’s /boot folder, appending -f13a to each filename, and made an entry in /boot/grub/grub.conf:
title Install F13 Alpha root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz-f13a initrd /initrd.img-f13a - I rebooted, held down the Ctrl key so I’d see the boot menu, and booted into this entry.
- Once the installation process started, I chose the URL installation method and pointed the installer at my HTTP server, specifically to the …x86_64/os/ folder under which the images/install.img file lives.
That was it. So far the upgrade process is actually a bit boring really… which is a great thing to say about an upgrade process.
The work that the Anaconda team has put into this release really shows. Choices are more fully explained in understandable terms. Icons make more sense and better illustrate the process you’re choosing. I’m going to do a fresh installation to a VM later so I can see how some of the other code paths work, but I’m totally impressed with the improvements.
I know that once I start up the new Fedora 13 pre-release, I’ll have more goodness to report. ?
I was just about to install Fedora 13 (on a laptop that lacks a CD / optical drive of any description). I was going to try a PXE boot, but I think I’ll try your method first 🙂
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