Laughlin to Lovelock -- Driving tour of Nevada cities or Fedora distributions

OK so here we go, attempting a preupgrade of Laughlin to Lovelock. This isn't meant to be anything other than my attempt(s) and while some things might have already been noted in other places or in release-notes, like a good geek I am going at this blind and troubleshooting as I go. I did basically just a yum update, followed by a yum install preupgrade, and then ran from the terminal preupgrade and followed the "ahem" GUI along to start the process.

Checking for new repos for mirrors
* preupgrade-updates: mirror.umoss.org
unknown metadata being downloaded: metalink.xml.tmp
unknown metadata being downloaded: repomdcGv3ZLtmp.xml
unknown metadata being downloaded: MEMORY
Fetched treeinfo from http://mirror.metrocast.net/fedora/linux/releases/15/Fedora/x86_64/os//.treeinfo
treeinfo timestamp: Fri May 13 15:44:30 2011
unknown metadata being downloaded: MEMORY

This appears to be caused by the adobe repository, removing or disabling the repo allowed the "Downloading filelist metadata..." portion to continue, I was able to do this dynamically, without having to stop and restart the process. You should probably check out which repos you have enabled, listed in the yum.repos.d directory and disable/enable any accordingly (in conjunction with the following package pruning suggestion as well).

Checking for new repos for mirrors
* preupgrade-updates-testing: mirror.symnds.com
Downloading 1.4GB
Available disk space for /var/cache/yum/preupgrade: 12.1GB

As an FYI, appears a requirement of about 1.5GB of space in /var in order to download the required packages. This will obviously differ according to the number of packages you have installed. You should probably prune any unwanted packages or software prior to the preupgrade process especially if you do not have the required space in /var. I do have a lot of bloat, but I have the space.

Should also note, Eclipse took about 5-8 minutes to download during the process, to save time, might want to uninstall and reinstall later since I am going to have to remake the workspaces anyway.

So adobeair ended up being a game changer, which sucked ... on top of the repo issue noted above, when the install started, after the downloads, it failed on adobeair, and so the install failed.  Rebooted into an older kernel (Fedora 14) and was able to remove adobeair RPM altogether.  Then reboot and kickoff the Lovelock Kickstart again.  It completed, but alas, had a kernel panic.  Back to F14 (thank god for rescue kernels kept on the system) and I removed the kernel-2.6.38.8-13.fc15.x86_64 and then reinstalled it by yum --releasever=15 install kernel-2.6.38.8-13.fc15.x86_64.

Then, both fedora-release RPMs were installed, one for 14-1 and one for 15-3 ... but, the files all read for 15, all the /etc/redhat-release, /etc/fedora-release, blah blah (rpm -ql ${PACKAGE_NAME} will show files installed by packages) ... anyway, I tried to figure it out, but just removed the 14-1 and it was fine.  What happened was the cache kept pointing to 14 for yum, yum clean all, yum removecache, all the goodies didn't work ... figured removing the fedora-release-14.1 would fix it, but the rescue (saved) kernels are still fc14, and while I don't plan on going back and running/updating in them, it's kind of annoying.

Well, enjoying Gnome-Shell (aka Gnome 3) now ... will see how long I can stand this new environment .. it still isn't as bad as KDE.