It was last week when a couple of issues summed up and forced me to think about how to update my working machine from Fedora 16 to Fedora 18. Basically I had the choice between running a fresh (after a decent backup)  install or upgrading from Fedora 16, via 17, to 18. In general I really prefer doing fresh installs - as you get a clean system and old cruft is removed, but this time I tried to avoid to backup all the little pieces which somehow tangent my work environment. Those pieces ain't mission critical, it's just that re-creating them is boring. Long story short - I just went the upgrade path, with doing a fresh install being my fallback solution.

I ran pre-upgrade on the Fedora 16, which initially failed (It got confused by the EFI setup), but this could be fixed by manually adding the grub entry for booting up pre-upgrade. It took a couple of hours until the upgrade was finished. But everything seemed to work. After trying a couple of applications, I installed fedup and - just waited. It felt a bit longer but also finally succeeded. I was a bit concerned right after the update, because I was confronted with a dracut rescue shell. But a reboot helped. It seems that there is a time out for lucks prompt, which drops you to the emergency shell in case you don't enter the password in time.