Everyone:
No complaints here. Just some insights from some recent experiences.
Bottom line: everyone who administers a Fedora system, should do a
"clean install" or an effective system refresh (reinstalling the OS and
all apps on a system having a separate /home partition) at least, I
would say, once for every three new versions of Fedora. The "fedup" app
lets too many minor faults accumulate in a system over time. Result: you
are cheating yourself and your users of a good user experience.
Long ago I did a yum upgrade from F14 to F17. At first everything went
swimmingly. And then I got the problem some of you might remember my
complaining about: after two hours of operation, or maybe four or five
or six hours if I were especially blessed (or as quickly as five minutes
if I were under a special curse), new windows and dialog boxes would
open as an unrelieved black. (Some KDE pop-up menus and notifications
would pop up as a transparent outline.) I filed bug after bug after bug
with Bugzilla. I re-filed with every new upgrade, which I accomplished
with fedup. From F17->F18, F18->F19, and F19->F20, the problem
persisted. Frankly I'm surprised the PTB's didn't CLOSE the bug as WONTFIX.
Two weeks ago I acquired a new, replacement machine for one of the two
mini-towers on myh network. At the same time, the mouse on my F20
machine went wild, opening and closing windows and pushing buttons
without my conscious input, so I couldn't stop it. Finally the mouse
just quit. I figured out what happened: the mouse cable had frayed.
Happily, with the new shipment, I got a USB mouse and a USB keyboard
that I now can keep as spares.
But I decided to put F20 on another machine I had intended to replace.
(It was a video-capture machine, and I needed a faster processor with
more memory to do it properly.) I figured, why not go from a Pentium
Dual-Core with 3 GB RAM and a 500-GB HDD to an Intel Core 2 Quattro with
8 MB RAM and a 1TB HDD?
This involved downloading and burning an F20 KDE live spin, inserting it
into the intended replacement machine, and doing a complete system
format--reclaim the drive space, put in the new automatic partition (50
GB for /, 8 GB of swap, 500-MB physical boot partition, and all the
rest, 790 GB, for /home), install F20 from the Internet, and
painstakingly replicate my old environment--or at least those parts of
it I wanted. Fresh install of samba, Firefox, Thunderbird, gnucash, and
any other application I used regularly.
I learned later that the old machine had been providing a crutch for
samba connectivity to other machines on the network. When I retired the
old machine, I lost that. Temporarily. I had to relearn everything I'd
learned and forgotten about configuring samba by directly editing the
smb.conf file. But now I have two machines--a desktop and a laptop--that
can establish samba connectivity independently.
But that black rectangle problem I complained about? That is now solved!
And something else: dialog buttons have a new, "more modern" look. This
should have come with the F19->F20 fedup upgrade. But it did not. It
came with a clean install on a brand-new physical box, to which I have
migrated all my "stuff."
I can only conclude that the yum upgrade introduced the first of several
cumulative errors. Every upgrade since then, introduced another one, and
another, and another. These errors pile up. They won't cause a
catastrophic failure, but they will create several annoying problems you
might never solve.
To the development team that gave us fedup, listen up! Your application
is not taking care of all these little things.
With /home partitioned off separately (as an LVM partition), I assume I
can install F21 "cleanly" in the / partition without risking losing the
contents of /home or my access to them. But I still have to write down
every modification I made to a configuration file--or else keep copies
of those files in /home. They would include, I also assume, things like
the files holding the UIDs, GIDs, and passwords for Users and Groups.
That's the only reason I don't plan to do a clean install every time.
But I wouldn't mind doing it every other time, or every third time. To
make sure these cumulative errors don't build up again.
Again, I offer this to provide some insight into problems that we
"amateur system administrators" sometimes have.
Temlakos
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