Fedora 12, x86-64 upgrade

The time has come again..sytem upgrade. Ugh.

From Fedora 10 x86-64 to Fedora 12 x86-64
I say "ugh", but I truly am excited as Fedora 12 does have some nice performance improvements (ext4, kernel modesetting, faster boot, rpm) that they've packaged since the Fedora 10 system I'm working with now:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/11/FeatureList
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/12/FeatureList

To be clear, I don't do upgrades. I will tar up my /home directory to USB, install the new OS from scratch and then blast my /home directory onto the clean new OS and RAID array.

Thinking Hard
I've spent quite a bit of time planning this upgrade. One of the big things I am doing is to profile the performance of my system before and after the OS and hardware upgrades. Of course, I won't be able to determine whether or not the performance gain is coming from the OS or the new RAID array, but at the end of the day, I simply want to be able to say "my system is now X% faster."

I will be looking at the performance of the system from the OS, Cinelerra and encoder perspectives.

Learning about Fedora 12
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F12_bugs
http://www.scribd.com/doc/24513176/Fedora-12-Installation-Guide
Changes_in_Fedora_for_Desktop_Users

Hardware changes going in
New RAID configuration:
3WARE Pci-e 9650SE RAID card with Battery Backup
four Western Digital 1.5 TB Green SATA 32MB Cache Hard Drive

Virtual Machine Testbed
One of the things that has helped me in the process is using VMware Server to test out Fedora 12. I've caught a couple things right off the bat: as it is a proprietary format, FAAC is not installed with FFmpeg by default. I was able to resolve this through Doran's excellent post here:
http://fozzolog.fozzilinymoo.org/tech/2009/11/recompiling-ffmpeg-for-fedora-12-to-add-faac-support.html

Also, H264 encoder magic has changed a bit. Other than that, my output testing to various formats (MPEG-PS, HDV, DVD, iPod/iPhone) has worked very well.

General prep work
work out bugs with Fedora 12 virtual machine
clean up old F10 system
backup F10 system files via script
backup /home directory via tar to external drive

Installation steps
Install new F12, Developer's edition
Install RPMs via script
Build and install FFmpeg RPM with faac support from nonfree RPM Fusion repo via script
Install favorite programs
Install Cinelerra dependencies
Install Cinelerra

For those with strong constitutions, here's the full project plan:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AjSzE_zejuQZdFphck9aQUVBbzZVOWhyOC1CaVFVQmc&hl=en

I'm almost there..most of the planning is done. Now, to execute! I'll let you know how it goes.
The Mule

Reference
http://www.graphics-muse.org/wp/?p=501