Here were the major stumbling blocks:
1. The “depsolve hang in upgrade” bug which meant I needed to wait for a respin or follow instructions listed in redhat’s bug database. (I decided to wait for the respin)
2. The “respins” from fedoraunity.org took a while to be created, and use the totally insane ‘jigdo’ downloader. They took about 2.5 days to download 4GB. By contrast, a bittorrent download af the same data takes about 4 hours.
3. The installer ran mostly smoothly, but took several hours to upgrade my system.
4. The installer didn’t upgrade over 1100 packages on my system. I had to boot it up and run “yum update” to finish updating these.
5. Even after ‘yum update’ I had a bunch of issues getting my monitor resolution back to 1280×1024 (it wanted to be 800×600)
6. Fedora doesn’t inculde mp3 playback, mencoder, or mplayer, so you need to enable ‘extra’ yum repositories to get these files. There are several choices, and they usually just fuck up your system beyond repair. (atrpms, freshrpms, dag, livna, etc.)

All in all, it took about 3 months to progress from step 1 to step 6.

At least my system still works. Mail works, the web works, gallery works, music works. Phew.

Next time, I’m going to build a new computer, and I think I’ll just install gentoo. I’m not sure yet, though.

After a bit of searching I found a link to the bug “depsolve hang in F7 to F8 upgrade”> (of course!)

Seems like they have some kind of updates patch for the Fedora 8 installer, but it hasn’t yet been rolled into the released images. Ugh. You can read about it more on the Fedora 8 common bugs wiki page. There’s nothing like a “common bugs” page to make you feel really confident about a linux distro.

Any suggestions about how I could move my system from FC6 to Ubuntu? User data via backups is easy, but I’m loathed to even think about trying to replicate my postfix, mysql, and httpd configs in a new distro…