This is a short note about upgrading my laptop with Fedora 19 (KDE spin) to Fedora 20. On this laptop originally run Fedora 17, which was upgraded with fedup tool to 18 and later on to 19. Since both upgrades in the past were done without a big drama, I decided to repeat the exercise with Fedora 20. If you’re not familiar with fedup I would recommend reading official documentation. Before I started with the upgrade I run “sudo yum update” on Fedora 19 to refresh the system with the latest packages, then I followed the following steps:

1) Update fedup tool
Make sure you have up to date version of fedup installed, version 0.7, which was installed on my Fedora 19 didn’t work due to a known bug.

$ sudo yum --enablerepo=updates-testing update fedup

2) Prepare system for upgrade

$ sudo fedup --network 20

This step will download all the packages and prepare upgrade “transaction”. In my case over 2400 packages were downloaded (it took close to 90 minutes on 50Mbps internet connection, be patient, it can take hours). During download fedup just stopped downloading without
reporting any error, simply returning to the prompt. Fortunately you can repeat the command again and it’ll continue downloading packages from where it stopped. Overall, I repeated fedup command three times before I was notified that I can reboot.

3) Reboot and wait for upgrade to complete

Eventually fedup will ask you to reboot. You’ll see “System upgrade” option in Grub menu that you should select after you reboot. Fedup will also give you a warning if some repository is missing, for example I later on disabled Dropox repository (the first time you run yum you’ll be notified of any repository not (yet) available for Fedora 20).
Another thing you’ll notice while running yum are warnings that some group is missing. Just ignore the warnings, it’s known bug (see section 3.3) in Fedora 20.

$ sudo reboot 

Be patient, this will take awhile (another 90 minutes on my laptop with ~2400 packages).
And that’s it, after 90 minutes and last reboot I had working Fedora 20 on my laptop.

4) Quirk
Since Fedora 20 obsoleted old Network Management applet and replaced it with the new one, at first I didn’t even notice that UMTS modem was not showing at all in new Network Manager. After inserting broadband modem USB stick I checked with lsusb if modem is recognized by the kernel and it showed as Globtrotter HSDPA modem. It took me some time to figure out that the reason was disabled ModemManager service, so I fixed the issue with:

$ sudo systemctl start ModemManager.service
$ sudo systemctl enable ModemManager.service

That’s more or less it. So far I didn’t notice anything else that doesn’t work. All I can say is that I’m impressed by fedup capabilities, I’m sure the number of glitches will drop with the maturity of the product.