I've just gotten through with upgrading my office workstation from Fedora 11 to Fedora 13 with my first yum upgrade, and I have to say that the experience was reasonably pleasant. Reasonably pleasant here means that nothing exploded and I could use my machine throughout the process, which is what I wanted out of the whole exercise.

I did have to do some cleanup work in order to get the upgrade to start by removing various packages that caused yum to choke, all ultimately due to the RPM multi-architecture file problem. Most of the problems were orphaned 32-bit Fedora 11 packages, where there was only a 64-bit package in Fedora 13 and so the old 32-bit package clashed with the new 64-bit one; I fixed those by removing the 32-bit packages. The one odd problem was yum deciding it needed the 32-bit KOffice libraries as well as the 64-bit ones for some inexplicable reason (I didn't have any 32-bit KOffice components installed in Fedora 11). I solved that problem by removing KOffice entirely.

The upgrade process itself took three hours or so to run (much like my last upgrade), but I'll call that fair since it was doing just under 6,000 package operations between upgrades and installs of new packages and cleanups of old ones. I didn't have any problems running it inside an X session, although I took the precaution of running it inside screen and as advised I excluded bitmap-fonts-compat from the main upgrade, doing it only at the end after I had quit out of X and was about to reboot the machine.

(I am technically not entirely finished the upgrade, because I now need to weed out a number of orphaned packages, sweep the system for .rpmnew files and work out what to do with them, and so on. But the important work is done and my system works again; what's left is basically cleanup.)

In fact I was impressed by how much ran well during the whole process. I actually started using the new Firefox part way through the upgrade and nothing exploded, somewhat to my surprise.

My experience in the upgraded Fedora 13 environment is mostly positive, in that most of the important things on my system have worked without problems. I did have a spot of alarm when I couldn't get any sound, but it turned out that PulseAudio had muted my output device. (I have to say that pavucontrol does not make this state very obvious if you are not already familiar with it.)

(Overall I am not entirely happy with Fedora 13 right now, but that is because USB serial ports seem to be utterly broken on my machine and the perversity of the universe chose tonight of all nights to somehow totally kill my main phone line, DSL included. I could really use that backup PPP connection right now, but instead it is causing my kernel to log messages about processes hanging in the depths of the TTY and USB systems.)