saphil

Upgrade FC4 to FC5 using YUM

Keeping in mind that mine is a highly unusual system, such as a computer hacker, applications developer or network security student might be running. Your system may do things entirely differently. I hope it would be smoother for you than this. The fewer applications you have installed on your machine, the fewer need to be upgraded.

1. Download and install the Fedora Core 5 version of fedora-release from one of the Fedora Core mirrors.

Example:
# rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pu...5-5.noarch.rpm

2. Upgrade to Fedora Core 5. the -y just means "unattended mode". When yum would ask for a yes or no answer, the answer is automatically "yes."
# yum -y upgrade

You now find yourself with a mixed FC4/FC5 installation. Reboot works but some packages are still FC4. Upgrade aborts because of dependency errors. The GUI is working, though.

3. Handling dependency errors. I used clean all to clear up some of the local database (this speeded up the process of getting to the dependency errors)
yum -y clean all

4. Find out how many old kernels are still hanging around. These can cause dependency issues as some packages are no longer included at all in the new version, so there are no upgrades available for them.
[root@conquistador ~]# rpm -q kernel kernel-smp
kernel-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4
kernel-2.6.14-1.1656_FC4
kernel-2.6.15-1.1830_FC4
kernel-2.6.15-1.1831_FC4
kernel-2.6.15-1.1833_FC4
kernel-2.6.16-1.2069_FC4
kernel-2.6.16-1.2096_FC4
kernel-2.6.16-1.2107_FC4
kernel-2.6.16-1.2108_FC4
kernel-2.6.16-1.2111_FC4
kernel-2.6.16-1.2115_FC4


5. Upgrade the Kernel to the FC5 kernel
yum update kernel
[aborted on bad dependencies] Trying to remove the oldest kernels
rpm -e kernel-2.6.11* kernel-2.6.14* kernel-2.6.15-1.1830*
rpm -e kernel-2.6.16-1.2069_FC4 kernel-2.6.16-1.2096_FC4 kernel-2.6.16-1.2107_FC4 kernel-2.6.16-1.2108_FC4 kernel-2.6.16-1.2111_FC4
[rpm -e will not use a wildcard to take multiple kernels. I just used the * to avoid having to type the whole file name]

Clean up the Cache again
yum clean all

Still having dependency errors. Especially interesting because there are many packages with dependency problems which are not on the machine. They only appear in the yum header cache and up2date cache

yum -yt upgrade kernel

[the -t is to tolerate errors.. maybe the thing will allow the installation even though there are non-existent packages whose dependencies are not there either.] [still fails]

reboot
[no effect noted]

Obtaining Kernel Source through 'yum'
from http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mj...#kernelheaders

There are yum utilities which will download the LATEST kernel source.

yum install yum-utils
[this did a yum-utils install]

yumdownloader --source /home/wolf/Desktop/kernel-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5.src.rpm
[didn't work, used rpm ivh to install

rpmbuild -bp --target=$(uname -m) /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/kernel-2.6.spec
[to set up. I am now going to reboot again to see if the new kernel is enacted.]

Still showing the old kernel, but yum update shows there are over 600 updates available and they are (at least some are) FC5. I am going to try to do this update in cli only, as the whole gui is so soupy when you are doing a yum operation. Uses all the RAM.. no virtual memory. [ctrl] [alt] [F1]

I am now stuck. I have put over 2 days into figuring this out, and kept meticulous notes and it is not working.

Help!!



? yum -y upgrade b* c*

--The ? means I am not there yet. b* and c* are a way to get to the failure quicker by only upgrading packages that start with a given letter, and this seems to work.

antidrugue

Why exactly would you want to go through all this? If you have a separate /home partition, why not just do a clean FC5 install and keep the /home unchanged?

Can you give more details? What are you trying to accomplish by going through such an experimental upgrade process?

__________________
"To express yourself in freedom, you must die to everything of yesterday. From the 'old', you derive security; from the 'new', you gain the flow."

-Bruce Lee

saphil

Probably because I do not have a burner to make the ISOs.

No, seriously...
I have successfully done a similar upgrade from Ubuntu Hoary to Dapper, (before the final release of the source isos), and I wanted to know if it could be done with FC4/5. The issues I encountered upgrading Ubuntu were not exactly trivial, but now I know how to do all sorts of things that were just theoretical (to me) before.

I believe that it is theoretically possible to do upgrades entirely from Internet sources, and I feel that it is the wave of the future. Finding where the breakage occurs should be useful in correcting the breakage. Sadly, I do not have a /home partition. This hard drive is designed to be (as nearly as possible) the same as one of my students at the college would develop as their class hard drive. :: one drive, dual booted Windows & FC4 (as of last quarter). It makes sense to have a separate /home partition, and I will suggest that the "standard partitioning" include it in the future. up2date did not work in FC4, so I was using YUM to do updates. Made sense to extend this to 'yum -y upgrade' to get to FC5.

My students are exceptionally good at working their way into corners that their instructors can't help them out of. I want to be able to push the body of knowledge a bit, both for them and for my own entertainment.

Wolf Halton

P.S. Of course, I always have the option to say "put your /home directory on its own partition and start with a clean install of FC5," if all else fails. The question is "why must all else fail?"

antidrugue

I guess the upgrade process is just not as smooth in some distro.

For example, I never had problems in upgrade process like that in Debian. I can upgrade from Sarge to Etch with a simple word change in /etc/apt/sources.list (replace "sarge" by "etch") and then do the rest with apt-get :
I have done this several times without any issues (and from Etch to Sid as well).

In Ubuntu and Fedora it seems to be a little more complicated though. In those case a separated /home partition really matters. Some colleges and universities recommend this method :
http://www.ces.clemson.edu/linux/fc5_setup.shtml

__________________
"To express yourself in freedom, you must die to everything of yesterday. From the 'old', you derive security; from the 'new', you gain the flow."

-Bruce Lee

saphil

I will see what new I can get from it, thanks. Ubuntu, in many cases, works just fine doing apt-get dist-upgrade (I am told). My installation is not standard, so I call down on myself issues of dependency. If all this was were a web server or a file server, I would bet there would be nowhere near the hassle.

-Wolf

Narry

Anyone come up with a solution? I'm having similar problems, although I'm pretty sure my OS is much less complex than Wolf's. Seems like Fedora = Dependency hell.

saphil

Narry,
I never found a solution to it, and finally decided to scrub the FC4/5 mess and re-partition with a separate /home partition and /usr and /usr/local and /var partitions.. In fact I chose to set up as many separated partitions as Ubuntu 5.04 would let me have. Then I apt-get dist-upgraded two major versions to an alpha version of Ubuntu's development version 'edgy eft'.

I hit no dependency snags, in the first dist-upgrade at all. It was smooth as silk. When I hit dependency snags was in dist-upgrading to the alpha version of edgy, and somebody on the Ubuntu Forum suggested the package 'aptitude', which solves dependency issues for you in all sorts of different ways. I now have a very effectively working test-bed of edgy with zero dependency problems. This seems like a solid win for our side. I do not know if there is something built for RPM-based linux systems like RedHat and FC, so this might not solve all of your problems, unless you want to move to ubuntu.

After all this playing about, I received the Ubuntu LTS, Dapper Drake, 6.06 disks I requested from Canonical yesterday... long after the disk would have come in handy on this question. A reasonable search does not turn up a version of aptitude for FC4. This might be a really neat project to start (or re-start) It looks like there was a version of aptitude for fc2...