Upgrading to Fedora 21 Workstation from Fedora 20

Fedora 21 was released yesterday, and if you are running Fedora 20 as a desktop, you will probably want to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of Fedora. Luckily, there is a tool called FedUp that is the most simple way to upgrade to Fedora 21 Workstation.

1. Make sure your current system is up-to-date and backed up

First up, ensure that you have the most up-to-date version of Fedora 20 by updating your system using the Software application, or running the following command in the terminal:

sudo yum update

2. Install the FedUp tool

Now, open up a Terminal and install FedUp and ensure you have the latest version of the Fedora Release package by using the following command line:

sudo yum install fedup

fedora-release

At this point, while probably not 100% necessary, i like to reboot my system to ensure that the most up-to-date versions of lower system level packages are being used

3. Start the update with FedUp

Now your system is fully up-to-date, start the upgrade using the following command.

sudo fedup --network 21 --product=workstation

This command will tell FedUp to download all the appropriate packages from the Fedora repositories, and prep your system for the upgrade.

4. Reboot, and upgrade

Once the FedUp command from step 3 has completed without errors, reboot your system. In the Fedora Boot Menu (i.e. grub), there will be a menu item “System Upgrade”, select that and press enter.

All the appropriate packages and upgrade tasks will now be completed automatically, and when completed you will be able to log in to your newly upgraded Fedora 21 Workstation.

Further Information

For more detailed instructions on using FedUp for upgrading (including using a downloaded ISO or another installation source other than the network), check out the FedUp wikipage. This page also has details on issues that you may encounter during an upgrade.

Using Software

25 Comments

  1. If fedup is the official upgrade tool why doesn’t it come pre-installed on Fedora systems.

    • This might be a thought to bring up with the relevant Working Groups for the fedora flavors. Also, I don’t know if FedUp is the “official” upgrade tool. I certainly didnt state it in this quick howto.

      • Chad

        On the FedUp wikipage it says it is the recommended way to upgrade since 18.

      • Is there no official upgrade tool for Fedora? I see two popular contender for upgrading Fedora system – Yum and FedUP – out of which FedUP is the recommended one.

        • Philip Whitehouse

          YUM and FedUp aren’t competitors. I’m pretty sure FedUp uses either YUM or DNF (which competes with YUM) at the back-end.

  2. fedup “just worked”, on my system. Nothing to do afterwards. Ideal.

  3. Fredy Braun

    Work perfect.

  4. Cory Hilliard

    Not sure who I should report this to, but everything worked awesomely, but at the final “reboot” it just hung there for like an hour. I did a hard reboot and it worked great.

    • Do you know where it was stuck? A bug report against FedUp is probably the first place. Without more information it’s probably not going to help much in solving the problem, but if there are other reports maybe we can find a pattern.

    • had a similar situation, in my case the system was waiting for the logs to finish writing (971 MB!!), mostly permission files problems.

      Even on a ssd this took more than the real upgrading.

  5. shawn

    I read (somewhere…) that this will upgrade and install all gnome stuff, so it might not be a good solution for someone like me who is using the kde spin. Is this correct?

    • Only if you intentionally tell it --product=workstation — although note that in that case it will still also upgrade whatever else you have installed. If you don’t want to end up with Fedora Workstation for whatever reason, use --product=nonproduct.

  6. Ervin

    I just installed Fedora 21 and it is a step down from 20. Apart from a few gnome animations, a better gnome maps (buggy though) there really does not seem to be much. In addition to that the gnome software center had very severe bugs! I couldn’t install a single package and those I did install, I had either installed through the terminal or stared at the software center without touching anything else, waiting for it to finish installing. In 20 being an administrator installing software is a breeze.

    • Please report the specific bugs. In general, this doesn’t match most of the reports we’re getting. There’s also a lot that really is new — it just may be that it’s not in areas you care about… and that’s okay.

      • Ervin

        I am sure there are definitely many improvements. But for me as an average user, using the graphical interface correctly, that is it does what it is meant to do, is the most important. When I click install, I expect it to be installed. I have already filed bugs.

  7. In Fedora 21, will there be a big friendly button to upgrade to Fedora 22?

    It’s unreasonable to expect ordinary users to use the command line just to keep their system secure. (I know Fedora 20 remains secure for now, but not forever.)

    • Krystian

      I’ve wrote unofficial GUI for FedUp (KFUpgrade) – just a few buttons and it call xterm with parameters. Simple but effective. Simple, but it helped few casual user’s and it’s main purpose is to promote Fedora and solve CLI upgrade problem for ordinary user’s (as long Fedora Team will not release official GUI). And it’s on GPLv3.

      Maybe it will help You too 🙂 http://sourceforge.net/projects/kfupgradeapp/

  8. Hi,

    I have a machine that has two Fedora OS pre-installed on two separate partitions (F20 final and F21 beta). After using the tool Fedup to upgrade to F21 (final) from F20, I cannot see the menu item “System Upgrade” in GRUB after rebooting. Does anyone know my issue?
    Notes: F20 and F21 (beta) both have separate /boot partitions.

    Thang

  9. tom

    Thank you very much. Updated my KDE Fedora using those comnands, got that garbage gnome desktop. Installed KDE, switched to it, now have half KDE half gnome. Steam looks weird. Damn, gnome 3 is just so bad, SO bad, I don’t understand how anyone can use it. Thanks to you, I will have to reinstall my KDE Fedora.

    • Carl's Son

      Under Gnome you could just upgrade rest of the packages (not included in Workstation) via yum and everything would be well.

  10. we need more graphic tools in fedora workstation

  11. John

    Fedup from 20 to 21 “just worked” except for one small item – after the reboot into the upgrade kernel the scrolling display started off normal but then over time ended up looking like an open bracket and a closed bracket with no info inside. If I hit the Enter key, the info returned to a normal state. A very small issue but worth reporting.

    • HLev

      Same here, 20=>21, the output lines started “decomposing”, first the message disappeared, then the counters, and so on. I waited 30mins and were about to do a hard reboot when I read your comment, so thank you!

  12. Deepak Bansal

    Working perfectly for me, It was showing gnome started issue, Fortunately i succeed to resolve this issue.

Comments are Closed

The opinions expressed on this website are those of each author, not of the author's employer or of Red Hat. Fedora Magazine aspires to publish all content under a Creative Commons license but may not be able to do so in all cases. You are responsible for ensuring that you have the necessary permission to reuse any work on this site. The Fedora logo is a trademark of Red Hat, Inc. Terms and Conditions