[olug] Fedora 23 Upgrade Notes

[Jon Larsen]

I've been upgrading my Fedora boxes for some time now.  The last full
installs I did was for Fedora 21, when I purchased a SSDs for my laptop and
desktop.  Upgrades have been pretty seamless using 'fedup'.

With Fedora 23, they've changed it slightly by using 'dnf'.  So, read up on
the changes if you plan to upgrade.

Here are a few notes from upgrades I've done in the past couple days.

My laptop downloaded all the packages, but couldn't set up for the reboot
because of a conflict in one of the installed rpmfusion base packages -
there was still a Fedora 21 version in there.  Not sure why the F22
rpmfusion packages didn't replace it, but removing it resolved my issue.
(I'm referring to the actual rpmfusion repo config rpm).

My desktop was a bit of a different matter.  I have a Nvidia 630 card
installed and have been using the nvidia binary drivers for some time -
mostly for video acceleration when editing and playing back video.  As
Fedora 23 contains a release candidate version of the 1.18 X server, the
Nvidia driver ABI has not been updated to work with it.  Nvidia will only
update their driver once the full release of 1.18 is available.  Of course,
I found this out after I upgraded.  So, searching some forums I found that
you can downgrade the X server to the Fedora 22 version.  Which is what I
did - I'm running the Fedora 22 version of X and the most recent Fedora 22
kernel with the RPMfusion nvidia driver.

Downgrade command:
dnf --releasever=22 downgrade xorg-x11-server-Xorg

Until such time that the full version of 1.18 is out and nvidia updates
their driver, I've excluded any X updates in the /etc/dnf/dnf.conf file:
.... clip here ....
exclude=xorg-x11-*
.... clip here ....

If you don't feel up to making all these changes, perhaps waiting a month
(hopefully) to upgrade to Fedora 23 would be the best course of action.  I
would have waited to upgrade my desktop had I paid more attention to some
of the forum posts from a few weeks ago.

If you're using an intel graphics adapter or the nouveau driver, you should
be fine.  Those with optimus hardware or the latest nvidia cards should
probably wait.

Jon L.