[BozemanLUG] Fedora preupgrade

[David Eder]

The preupgrade tool is pretty cool.  I actually did the update from 8 to
10 (there was no option for going to 9 first).  No cds to burn, no grub
lines to manually update.  It's really pretty simple.  You should watch
the console output, as the problems are listed there instead of in the
gui.  I removed a bunch of packages that it said would be problematic. In
the end, I only had a few problems.

The first was that the nspr package, which is essential for quite a bit of
the system to work, installed its libraries as symlinks to themselves. 
This was especially bad because it broken rpm.  I extracted the files from
the rpm on a different computer, deleted the broken symlinks and put them
in place.  It also breaks just about every service (X, httpd, postfix,
dovecot, rpm, yum) on the box until it is fixed.  This is supposedly only
a problem when you skip 9.

The second problem was that the new version of Bind didn't like my
configs. I commented out the offenders and will figure it out later.

The rest was getting KDE4 to work.  There's an abundance of stuff that is
supposed to help.  I tried a bunch of them all at once and don't really
know which ones helped.  I has to group remove kde for yum update to go
from 4.1 to 4.2.  But it all seems to work now, albeit a little slow.

David.



> David,
>
> ----- "David Eder" <david at eder.us> wrote:
>> Anybody played with the preupgrade utility for Fedora?
>>
>> For those that don't know what it is at all, it's an upgrade of a
>> live system.  I'm contemplating updating with it.
>
> The only people I've seen talking about preupgrade where folks on Planet
> Fedora shortly after Fedora 10 first came out.  I don't know many Fedora
> users locally other than you and your brothers... and a few friends in
> Billings... who usually lag behind releases and go every other one or so.
>
> As we discussed last meeting, I'm one of those folks who use every version
> and I do a fresh install... mainly because I've gotten good at retaining
> my data and putting it back... and have really streamlined the install
> process with the MontanaLinux respin.  If you like, I'll try and find time
> to build a Fedora 9 respin and then upgrade it to Fedora 10 with
> preupgrade.  It would have a lot of third party packages from rpmfusion so
> it would be a fairly easy yet fruitful test.
>
> So far as your stuff goes... do a good backup (assuming you have somewhere
> you can rsync to) and then try it.  If the upgrade doesn't go well, you
> can revert back to the backup... but yeah... what a big time pit that
> would be.  I don't think you'd encounter any significant issues with the
> upgrade process... but it is always good to be prepared just in case.
>
> As previously mentioned, I've done a lot of Fedora 7 to 8 to 9 to 10
> upgrades on systems with relatively few packages installed... as a result
> of my working on contributed OpenVZ OS Templates... and I have yet to run
> into any upgrade issues.
>
> TYL,
> --
> Scott Dowdle
> 704 Church Street
> Belgrade, MT 59714
> (406)388-0827 [home]
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