Jonathan Carpenter <jonathan.carpenter <at> gmail.com> writes: > I have an old fc2 server that is in production running sendmail,dhcpd,webmin,webmail I am wanting to upgrade to fc5 but I am afraid this may cause problems. Has there been any problems with any upgrade like this? I did an upgrade from FC2 to FC5 on an old (PII 266) laptop this week. The issues encountered: * My non-RAID hardware was misdetected as a RAID, which gave an "invalid partion table on device mapper/[some unintelligible letter combination]" error which wouldn't go away. The fix was to pass nodmraid on the kernel command line. That's probably an FC5/hardware problem unrelated to FC2 though. * Don't try using text mode with ISOs on the hard disk, that won't work (there's already a bug filed about that in RH Bugzilla). * Anaconda hangs during "Preparing packages for installation": - Passing selinux=0 on the kernel command line helps (maybe because it reduces RAM consumption, maybe because SELinux is causing some of the hangs, I don't know). It got rid of the hang during the first ISO for me so I could get packages installed before it hung again and restart the installer at that point to get it to complete. - Also worth trying: acpi=off noapic nolapic, and if you aren't using LVM also nolvm. - Restarting the installer after a hang works (at least it did for me), as long as something was installed before the hang. Luckily, the "preparing" stage is the one where hangs don't cause a big mess of duplicate packages. * After install, the kernel would panic immediately with "Attempting to kill init". I found SELinux to be the offender, it probably needs a relabeling. (I don't need SELinux, so I didn't bother investigating further.) Booting with selinux=0 works. * I had some duplicate packages (librsvg2 and rhythmbox) due to the postun scriptlet of the old package failing. The most reliable fix (making sure you end up with a complete version of the new package) is: rpm -e --noscripts packagename-theoldversion rpm -e --nodeps packagename-thenewversion yum install packagename WARNING: Don't do that with an essential package like glibc! Removing that can really hose your system. In that case, instead of rpm -e --nodeps and yum install, use: wget http://some.mirror/criticalpackage-thenewversion.arch.rpm rpm -e --nodeps --justdb criticalpackage-thenewversion rpm -ivh --force criticalpackage-thenewversion.arch.rpm Luckily, I didn't have duplicates of critical packages. * You'll undoubtedly end up with broken dependencies due to packages dropped from the distribution, packages moved to Extras, packages installed from Fedora.us (the old Extras) or third-party repositories and so on. You'll find Synaptic is a huge help to clean up the mess (it will upgrade what is upgradable (e.g. Extras packages) and remove what isn't, it also shows you which packages have been completely dropped (are in none of the repositories) so you can remove them if you don't need them), you can get the latest version (with multilib and repomd support) using: yum install synaptic If you don't have X11 on that server, you can use the command-line apt-rpm instead: yum install apt Someone on one of the Fedora lists also packaged aptitude (a text-mode apt frontend), check the archives. * Be prepared for several hundred MB (I'd estimate around a GB) of post-release updates (to fetch after the Anaconda upgrade). If this is a command-line only server, i.e. you don't have X11/GNOME/KDE/OpenOffice.org installed, it should be less though. Kevin Kofler
