fedora-10-logoFedora 10 is the latest version of Fedora released on 25th november 2008. In this article I will show you how to upgrade to the latest version of fedora from an older version of fedora without losing any information.

As you all know that in august 2008 the Fedora servers were compromised and the digital signature used to sign all Fedora packages may have been compromised. The digital signature is used to ensure that packages you install are authentic and not hacked or modified in any way.

As such you cannot upgrade your Fedora installation you need to make a simple update before automatic updates will accept packages signed by the new key:

HungryHacker@localhost:~$ su yum -y update fedora-release

That’s it! Then you can do an update and it will “just work”.

Now we will proceed towards installing the new package called preupgrade. To install the pakage type the following command:

HungryHacker@localhost:~$  su yum -y install preupgrade
HungryHacker@localhost:~$ preupgrade

Make sure you have version preupgrade-1.0.0-1.fc9.noarch or newer to support the upgrade to Fedora 10. This process does take a LONG TIME, requires a high speed internet connection and has a couple minor gotchas but so far I’ve done a couple upgrades with no data loss and pretty much everything has “just worked” afterwards. You don’t need to download and burn any ISOs as the upgrade is done on top of your current installation.

After the preupgrade script downloads a ton of packages it will reboot and begin the upgrade procedure automatically. Follow the instructions and after the upgrade is complete log back in and you’ll have to fix a couple little things. One things is that you’ll need to update the RPM Fusion repositories file below and then clear the yum cache. Once you do that you’ll have to do an update again and this time yum will automatically update any extra software you had installed from RPM Fusion with the previous version.

HungryHacker@localhost:~$ rpm -Uhv http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm \ http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
HungryHacker@localhost:~$ yum clean all
HungryHacker@localhost:~$ yum -y update

This too will take a while since it’s likely that dozens of packages will need to be updated. Once it’s done it’s a good idea to reboot again for good measure and if all goes well you should be done!