Fedora 18 is still at least two months away from hitting a download mirror near you, but if you have read the articles on pre-stable versions that have been published on this website, you’d know that Anaconda, the Fedora system installer, will be a completely different beast on Fedora 18.
How it’s going to be received will be an interesting thing to watch, so I’m not going to go into how or what the installer looks like here. You can see screen shots of it in Have you seen Anaconda’s new UI? and Should the root account be disabled in Fedora 18?.
If you did not click on the articles referenced above, here’s a screen shot of a pre-stable version of Anaconda.
One of the ways that Anaconda on Fedora 18 will be different from the previous editions is that it will no longer handle upgrades. That feature has been pushed on that a different system called Fedora Upgrader, or fedup. Fedup will be part of a two-stage system that will take care of all the tasks required to upgrade an existing Fedora installation to Fedora 18 and from Fedora 18 to subsequent releases.
It is designed to work like this:
There’s a frontend bit that sets up your system for the upgrade (downloads packages, sets up kernel & initrd, modifies bootloader entries, etc.). That’s fedup. And then there’s the “upgrader image” – the thing that fedup downloads to actually run the upgrade. That’s fedup-dracut. As the name implies, it’s just a regular dracut-built initramfs, with some extra bits and pieces thrown in.
Read the complete article here.
