This weekend saw the arrival of a new computer – woo! – a long-needed desktop upgrade which brought me the usual technological wtfs (“since when did CPUs come without pins?!” etc.). As part of this, I’ve been trying to upgrade my Fedora 11 Alpha to a more current rawhide.

Clearly I missed something, because even after a number of attempts in different ways I failed. rpm complaining about md5 mismatches or something, for example, which I kind of knew might be an issue from following devel but didn’t really anticipate. The worst of my attempts ended badly with rpm attempting to upgrade glibc, the pre-script failing (I think with some python error) and rpm bailing, leaving me with a completely horked system.

I also tried installing rawhide directly; again no joy – various segfaulty type issues and Xorg problems preventing success. So, having wasted a few hours on attempting to get rawhide up, I’m going to go with F10 and maybe try to upgrade again after the beta comes out – I believe in trying to test this stuff as much as possible, but unfortunately (and it’s probably as much to do with my hardware as anything else – e.g., Xorg won’t work with my monitor plugged into DVI at all, it just can’t figure out any screen modes bizarrely) it seems completely impossible right now.

Now I have a bit more space I can install a few different distro versions and things and hopefully provide a bit more testing coverage; the QA side of Fedora is something I’m very interested but completely inactive in. I’m sure all of this stuff basically works in VMs, but there’s no substitute for trying it on actual hardware… and being able to give decent feedback on what happened.