First 24 Hours With Fedora 20

Happy Happy Happy ! Fedora 20 rocks !

First 24 hours with Fedora 20 and everythings all good ! The install went great using fedup, and really couldn't of been any easier. I have to admit I was more than a bit concerned, and was relieved that the upgrade went so smoothly.

For the most part I didn't notice any major changes,  some new log viewers that I didn't notice before. Something I'll have to play with down the road. Fedora 20 also seems to use a little more of my system resources. Nothing major, and nothing to bothersome. I'm going to have to go through the log files soon and look for errors. I had one freeze up, but it's a problem I had with Fedora 18 as well that I was able to replicate in Fedora 20. It just hasn't been a big enough nuisance to have to fix. I'll save that fix for a boring rainy day when I need something to post.

Anyway, enough with this techno babble ! For the tweeted version : Fedora 20 good, fedup rocks, and I'm as happy as a fat kid with cake !

fedup Fedora 18 to Fedora 20

So, I really didn't get fed up with Fedora 18, but I used fedup to upgrade to Fedora 20 and was pretty happy with the results. I was considering trying another distro, but was really happy with Fedora 18, then today I came across some software that I wanted to try but it was only available for Fedora 2O. I looked into updating my system and fedup was the suggested solution to upgrade. I had access to a really fast internet connection today, so I decided if I was going to try this , today would have to be the day. This saved me a ton of time on the downloading packages part of this post. All in all the entire process took about two hours. Here's what I did and what happened.

NOTE: You must use su or sudo for all commands ! If you don't have a really fast internet connection add some time to your install for package downloads. This could take some time.

So I decided to try the fedup upgrade from Fedora 18 to Fedora 20 . The first thing I did was read the wiki on fedup here.

As per the instructions I did a full system update to insure everything was compatible with fedup.

yum update

I'm glad I did this because I did make a few changes to Grub that I forgot about and that may have affected the upgrade. The update reset grub back to it original configuration. 

Once Fedora 18 was fully updated I installed fedup

yum install fedup

You want to make sure you download fedup-0.8.0-3  as per my research earlier versions can be buggy. Once fedup was installed I rebooted the computer to make sure all the changes and updates took effect.

Once the computer rebooted I typed

fedup --network 20 --nogpgcheck

Unfortunately I didn't notate my notes as to why, but the --nogpgcheck is necessary when updating from 18 to 20 but not when updating from 19 to 20 . 

At this point if you don't have Chrome browser installed everything should go easy peazy. Skip the Chrome steps.  If you do have Chrome installed continued reading.

Chrome

So here's where I ran into my first problem.

Downloading failed: failure: repodata/filelists.xml.gz from google-chrome: [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try.

Google-chrome and google-repositories really goofed me up good for about 15 minutes.  If you run google-chrome uninstall it.

yum remove google-chrome

yum clean all

yum clean metadata

Then disable the google repositories

yum-config-manager --disable google-chrome

Once I did this I ran the

fedup --network 20 --nogpgcheck

And everything went fairly smoothly from there. fedup took care of just about everything. At the end of it, where it asks to reboot, I ended up with a couple warnings but at that point I think its almost to late to make any changes. I did some research before I did the reboot and it looked like the warnings were bugs, and o.k. to ignore. This was kind of scary, but all went well. If you get any warnings USE A SEARCH ENGINE AND MAKE SURE ITS BUG AND NOT AN ACTUAL PROBLEM. I think it should go without saying as well that you may want to backup any important data before you upgrade.

Once I rebooted , the entire install took a little over an hour on my computer. No problems at all, all data, and most of my configurations remained unchanged.  For a little clean up I simply did :

rpm --rebuilddb

I want to research doing additional clean up, because I know there are a lot of unused files left behind. After I do some research, that may be a post for another day.

And that's it, your done ! Hope this goes as smoothly for you as it did for me and enjoy your update Fedora 20 install. Good luck !

Appending Sequential Numbers To A Word Or File Using Linux

I needed to append some sequential numbering to a word to use in a list. For example :

word01
word02
word03
word04

The sequence of numbers had to go from 1 - 4999. Now I could of wrote this out 4999 times but that would of been painfully boring and probably would of given me a terrible case of carpal tunnel by the end of it all. Plus I use Linux, there must be an easier way to do this and there is ! It's called seq

If  you open up the terminal of your choice and type man seq it pulls up a small man page with a few options you can use. The option were interested in is the -f option. This is the printf style floating-point FORMAT. If your interested in getting a better understanding of this click here. Here's a basic command using this format with output:

seq -f "%04g" 6

output:

0001
0002
0003
0004
0005
0006

 The "%04g" gives us 4 digits starting with 0001 and continues on to 0006. This is pretty basic. We need to append these numbers to a word now, and start with 01 and go up to 4999. Heres what we do :

seq -f "yourword%02g" 4999

output:

yourword01
yourword02
yourword03

And this goes on till it reaches yourword4999. That would of been a lot of typing.

So now we need to put all this into a text file for another program to reference. Here's what you do.

seq -f "yourword%02g" 4999 > reference_file.txt

By adding the greater than symbol it pipes the output to a text file.

You can name the text file whatever you want. For my purposes it was a list file for another program I was running. Each word pointed the program to a numbered dir on a computer. You could also use this to create sequential file names.  For example:

touch $(seq -f "yourfilename%02g.txt" 10)

This would create yourfilename01.txt to yourfilename10.txt.  

 This is a great little program and with a little imagination you could really put this program to great use.