Upgrading to Fedora 9: Fun in a painful sort of way

What do you do on a Sunday when you're being rattled around by a cold? Take a deep breath and upgrade your copy of Linux from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9.

(For the uninitiated, my notebook is a dual-boot, XP and Fedora. I know which one is good for my soul, but practicalities force me to straddle.)

It shouldn't have been that difficult, but the truth is that the proclamations by linux enthusiasts oversell its benefits. This is one thing I don't like about the pro-Linux guys. Oh, Linux is ready for prime-time, they say. Linux is for everyone. All hail the now-full-of-user-friendly-GUIs Linux.

Rubbish. Although I have to admit that once it's set up, it's fine. And you can set it up any way you like. But the road there...

It's like someone promised you a scenic hike through the mountains, and then you found out that actually it was trudge 12-hour through some pretty toughish terrain, and you spent all the time with your head down, slogging away.

Fortunately, the Internet is full of signposts that help guide you (the trick is figuring out which ones are wrongly posted), and yes, the view at the end of it all is pretty good.

I'm going to list the problems I had between installation and the 'final' version. This is so that others have an indication of what to expect. And so I have somewhere to fall back to the next time I have to (re-)install this darned thing...

• I tried using preupgrade to shift from Fedora 8 to 9. In theory, run the program, wait, reboot and voila! In reality, run, wait, reboot, and ... can't log in. With any account.
• It was okay in run level 1, but not in 5. Couldn't figure it, so I reinstalled from zero.
  
• Of course, I had forgotten to do a backup before this, but fortunately runlevel 1 was accessible. Copied /etc and /home. And next time, I should tar before doing this if I'm going to back up to an NTFS drive...
• To help me keep track of what should be done/not done, I referred to The Perfect Desktop and Fedora Guide. I find that these are pretty good for an adventurous beginner too.
• (BTW, yum-fastestmirror is a good thing to install first off.)
• Tapping the touchpad to click the mouse didn't work. Solution was deceptively easy: Install the latest version of the driver. Allegedly they chose to take out the feature.
• The dreaded WiFi card. I have a Broadcom which is always a tough one to sort out, but surprisingly the instructions at Fedora Guide worked first time.
• There is no sound with YouTube. Hence, 'yum install libflashsupport' comes to the rescue.
• The videos don't work. After playing around, I realised that installing mplayer solved most of them, and the 'Windows' codecs take care of the rest.
• Sound was soft, so you adjust properties from System -> Preferences -> Hardware -> Volume Control.
• Installing vmware is a pain. You can either trust Vmware Server 1.0.6 (which installs well, but I don't like the Server product), or you can try installing VMPlayer - which raises other (thankfully, solvable) problems.
• ADDITION: Forgot about the Windows fonts. Copy fonts into inidividual directories from c:\windows\fonts to /usr/share/fonts, and then run mkfontscale and mkfontdir on those new directories.
  

At the end of the day, I guess everything works, but I can't honestly see a non-technical person solving these problems on their own (so I'm offering myself at RM30 per hour...).