During the weekend I upgraded Fedora on my laptop from Fedora 13 to Fedora 15 using the preupgrade utility. This initially took a lot of messing around. The main problem of capacity in the /boot partition was self-inflicted. When I created the partition layout for the system, I only allowed 100MB. This meant that there wasn't enough room to install the upgrade installer boot files to that partition.

Resizing the /boot partition, which was ext3, took a number of steps.

First, it was necessary to convert to ext2. All the utilities required can be found on Hiren's Boot CD by booting into small linux, knoppix would also be a good choice. First, tune2fs is used to convert from ext3 to ext2 by removing the jounal (-O ^has_journal). Once that is done, some space must be made to expand the boot partition. In my layout I removed the swap partition which is directly after to /boot. The friendliest way to do non-straight forward manipulation (i.e. resizing) of the partition table is with gparted. Start gparted and delete the swap partition, then resize the /boot partition to 250 meg. The next thing to do is resize the actual file system to occupy all of the partition. resize2fs is used to expand and shrink ext2 filesystems.

The other important thing I should mention: remove all your custom repos where possible i.e. Adobe et al. Otherwise preupgrade will go hunting for preupgrade packages at those repos (and fail).

Once all that was sorted, preupgrade was left to run overnight downloading about 2.6 gig of rpms.

In the morning I was presented with a reboot button. Once rebooted, the real work starts. Updating 2000 odd packages. This ran for most of the morning but once complete, it worked well with no major problems yet.

I have successfully revived the new laptop. Unfortunately, the spare lid and panel I received (for a different model) has a different mounting system, a straight panel/inverter swap was out of the question. Where the original panel is more inset to the lid with the mounting tabs on the glass side with standoffs extending from the back of the lid, the the new panel is flat on the rear of the lid with mounting tabs on the backlight side.

After assessment and a bit of testing I decided to fit the whole spare back lid to the laptop. Some modification was required. I had to modify the hinge mounting plates to fit the hole arrangement in the laptop and remove some of the plastic molding in places.

The machine was left running with a small stick of RAM running memtest with the screen on. Later in the day I returned and found it had passed successfully several times. I then removed the harddrive and RAM from my old laptop and fitted it to the new laptop.

If I had been running Windows on the original laptop, this probably would have posed a problem, thankfully I have Fedora 13 on it. The old laptop is intel based, the new AMD based. All that was required initially was to switch xorg over to the VESA driver temporarily until the machine came up on the new laptop and had the propriety ATI binary drivers installed. It "just works". Nice.