Fedora Project released the latest version of its Linux operating system yesterday on 21st March 2006. Just 6 days later than its official release date of 15 March 2006. Which going by the industry standards is phenomenal. I don't know yet whether it contains all the features that it promised it will contain. Its installing even as I write this. But it definitely contains some goodies like mono the open source development platform based on .Net and a bunch of other stuff. Every new version brings Linux closer to the corporate desktop and development environment.

As with any sysadmin, I am trying this on a VMWare (I am using version 5.5) machine to see if the upgrade goes smoothly or not before I even consider upgrading my production computer (on which this website is running, incidently). Some things to watch out.

• FC5 will not install on your VMware machine if you are using a BUSLogic SCSI driver for your virtual hard disk (which you most probably are as it is the default choice). It is unable to detect any hard drive and the upgrade just fails saying that the installer could not find any partitions on which to install. The solution is to change the driver of the adapter to LSILogic by modifying your VMWare configuration file (.vmx). Locate the line which says scsi<x>.present = "TRUE" and add the following in a line below this: scsi<x>.virtualDev = "lsilogic". After that boot up the VM and it should upgrade very smoothly. You may even want to update the drivers on your physical machine if you are using a BUSLogic SCSI driver. According to Redhat, "The BusLogic driver (for certain Mylex SCSI host bus adapters) is provided in the standard kernel packages, but it is only supported when the kernel is a guest operating system within VMWare™ virtual machine software. This is because VMWare presents an emulated SCSI adapter to the BusLogic driver, and this environment has been thoroughly tested and supported by VMWare, Inc. The BusLogic driver is not supported on physical SCSI host adapters because this driver has not been maintained in the official Linux kernel for several years, and has not received extensive testing in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux kernel."

• I don't know yet what impact does it have if I am using a IDE driver for my virtual hard disk. I will have to find that out tonight. My guess would be that IDE should be smooth.
• I am not sure yet what impact the upgrade have on performance in terms of increased hardware requirements. Every successive vendor release makes more demand on the hardware resources. Linux is no exception. But so far the impact has been minimal. As I noted in another article, I am able to run FC4 quite well on a P-III having 256MB of RAM. But I fear the worst. The upgrade process is taking too long by any standards (Just an upgrade of a custom built FC4 (having Apache, Python, X-Development etc) is taking more than 75 minutes (I don't like it at all) on a VMWare with Pentium processor (> 1GHz) and 384MB of RAM.
• I have a bunch of applications running on my production server (Apache, Zope and Plone for my website). Plus I am contemplating some more software like mail server, News server, software to handle photos etc. It remains to be seen how the upgrade will go. I of course have a similar development setup on VMWare and will test out there before touching the production computer. But it will be interesting to see.