Upgrading Fedora 18 Scientific to Fedora 19 Scientific

by Amit


Fedora 19 was released on July 2, 2013. The Fedora Scientific spin is unfortunately not available for this release, since I failed to remove couple of missing packages (scite and netbeans) from the kickstart file and hence the build was failing at the cut-off time. My apologies to all those old users who were looking forward to do a fresh install of Fedora 19 Scientific and the new users who were looking to try it out.

In this post I will describe to you in a few steps how you can upgrade your existing Fedora 18 Scientific installation to Fedora 19. We will use the FedUp utility for this purpose. Since this is a upgrade, the usual warnings apply. Things may go wrong, so please take backups of your data and configuration files if they are important to you. It is a good way to read the FedUp page before proceeding to get a general idea of what’s involved.

Here are the steps (standard for any Fedora upgrade adopted from the FedUp guide):

Update your system

First and foremost, update your system  (# yum update) and reboot to the latest kernel.

Install FedUp

Install the latest fedup package (# yum install fedup --enablerepo=updates-testing)

Prepare for the upgrade

If you see the FedUp guide, you will see that there are more than one way of preparing for the upgrade. I used the recommended network method. Here is what you have to do:

# fedup-cli --network 19 --instrepo http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/19/Fedora/x86_64/os/ --addrepo Everything=http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/19/Everything/x86_64/os/

Substitute the instrepo URL by something closer to you. I also found that I needed to add the Everything repo to get all the packages that Fedora Scientific has installed. If this step completes for you without any errors, reboot your system.

Executing the Upgrade

You should see a System Upgrade menu item in your GRUB menu, hit ENTER on that and your system should show the Plymouth screen. You can hit the ESC key to see what is happening. You should see the packages being upgraded. Once it completes, it should reboot and you can now boot into Fedora 19.

And you should have Fedora 19 with all the scientific spin packages updated to the latest releases.

Next steps

I didn’t need to do anything else.

I needed to do a # yum distro-sync to remove some of the F18 packages and get the F19 ones (emacs, for example).

However, I performed all of this in a virtual machine and I also did not upgrade my GRUB. (See here for the instructions).They worked for me. If it doesn’t work for you, leave a comment and I will try to address it.

New Installation of Fedora 19 Scientific

If you want to perform a fresh install of Fedora 19 scientific, it is easy to build your own live image. I will show in a next post to come up soon.

Here is the post: http://echorand.me/2013/07/04/creating-a-fedora-19-scientific-iso/

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