Upgrade/Reinstall from Fedora17 to Fedora19

Some weeks ago I finally reinstalled my Lenovo T-500 with Fedora 19 since Fedora 17 is end of life now. For Fedora 17 I built my own version of some packages like the i3wm tailing window manager. Fedora 18 and the new Fedora 19 include an actual i3wm with cairo support enabled. Some days ago a new version 4.6 of i3wm was released, I will backport this version for Fedora 19 within the next two weeks and add it to my yum repository.

For all users of my Fedora 17 yum repository I would advice you to update to Fedora 19 or at least Fedora 18, too.

On my T-500 I was facing a problem with the switcheroo configuration. I disabled the ATI graphic card by blacklisting the radeon kernel module. For me it looked like the order in which the graphic card was enabled at boot time was not persistent. This did lead to problems with the splash screen and X. I planed to write down how I disabled the module permanently to have it documented for other users, if you need the information now, send me an email.

Btw. I did not upgrade my system, I did an reinstall and reused my home partition. This is the most easy way for me to keep up to date with Fedora while keeping my data. I try to store everything important in my home directory and make a backup of all deeper system changes. Since there was no need to upgrade to Fedora18 this was even the only way to jump to Fedora 19 without hassle.

The new version works now a few weeks and got its first updates and kernel updates. After fixing the problem with my graphic cards the system works very stable. I am using the Gnome flavor but instead of gnome I am using i3wm as my favorite window manager. Some of the older gnome tools changed and because of this I am no longer able to use them to control for example the function keys. I did not investigate to fix this problem. It looks like the way Gnome controls ACPI, function keys and some more power saving functions changed in a bigger way. Since I am not really interested in reverse engineer this by my self I will wait for some posts from other Fedora i3wm users how to do this stuff.

Here is a very good post for all Fedora i3wm users: http://blog.seventhmoon.info/blog/2013/07/05/schrodingers-i3wm/