I decided to try doing a yum upgrade for the first time. It was
completely successful. Here's the details:
First, I read the FAQ from Fedora at
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq
and noted that they *don't* recommend this. Then I checked with
http://www.livna.org to make sure they had a Fedora 8 repository. (I
have several packages installed from livna. I didn't want to have to
erase them.)
Just in case, I turned off selinux enforcement:
setenforce 0
I shut down my KDE desktop and ssh-ed into the laptop from my desktop
machine to try to minimize any troubles when a zillion libraries get
updated. Now I think I'm ready:
yum clean all
yum update
rpm -Uvh http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/fedora/linux/releases/8/Everything/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-8-3.noarch.rpm http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/fedora/linux/releases/8/Everything/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-notes-8.0.0-3.noarch.rpm
I installed the livna Fedora 8 repository and did:
yum upgrade
At first, this said that there were no packages to update. Whoa.
That can't be right. So I did another clean all and tried again.
yum clean all
yum upgrade
This eventually complained about a dependency problem that
beryl-settings had, so I erased that package.
yum erase beryl-settings
yum upgrade
Transaction Summary
===================
Install 110 Package(s)
Update 976 Package(s)
Remove 0 Package(s)
Total download size: 1.0 G
Downloading Packages:
(1/1086): orca-2.20.0.1-1 ...
Once the upgrade started downloading the 1,086 packages, I realized
that I didn't have enough free space in my /var partition. Now I know
why I am using LVM. While the downloads were running, I opened
another root shell and doubled my /var partition:
lvresize -L +1G /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01
resize2fs /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01
That was painless. :-)
The downloads took about 2.5 hours on my BellSouth DSL link. The
upgrade took about 1.75 hours. Here are the error messages from yum:
Running Transaction
Updating : setup ################### [ 1/2090]
Updating : filesystem ################### [ 2/2090]
Error unpacking rpm package filesystem - 2.4.11-1.fc8.i386
error: unpacking of archive failed on file /var/mail: cpio: rename
Installing: baekmuk-ttf-fonts-common ################### [ 3/2090]
...
warning: /etc/security/limits.conf created as /etc/security/limits.conf.rpmnew
...
Updating : udev ################### [ 499/2090]
another udev daemon already running
...
warning: /etc/X11/fs/config created as /etc/X11/fs/config.rpmnew
...
Updating : libgnomedb ################### [ 873/2090]
I/O warning : failed to load external entity "/etc/gconf/schemas/libgnomedb-3.0.schemas"
Failed to open `/etc/gconf/schemas/libgnomedb-3.0.schemas': No such file or directory
...
warning: /etc/yum.conf created as /etc/yum.conf.rpmnew
...
warning: /etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc created as /etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc.rpmnew
...
Cleanup : parted ################### [1536/2090]
error: %postun(avahi-0.6.17-1.fc7.i386) scriptlet failed, exit status 1
That first one is worrisome. After rebooting, a yum update indicated
I needed the filesystem package and the same error occurred. Hmmm. I
looked at /var/mail and it is a real directory instead of a symlink to
/var/spool/mail and it contains a bunch of empty mailboxes like
apache, avahi, dbus, etc. all owned by root:root. I don't know how
this happened, but the fix was to remove the /var/mail directory and
replace it with a symlink to /var/spool/mail and then the filesystem
package updated successfully. Very strange.
I resolved the gnomedb error by erasing gnomedb (which took gnumeric
with it) and installing gnumeric. No errors this time.
I resolved all of the .rpmnew files by examining the diffs and doing
the Right Thing.
That left the error message associated with updating parted. It looks
like parted is trying to erase avahi-0.6.17-1.fc7.i386 and failed.
Yes:
$ rpm -q avahi
avahi-0.6.17-1.fc7
avahi-0.6.21-6.fc8
So I did a yum erase on avahi-0.6.17-1.fc7 and it completed without
wanting to take anything else with it and without any errors. It
looks like that's all the cleanup I need to do.
Another problem surfaced after reboot: the network manager applet
wanted to open the gnome keyring to get the password for my wireless
network, but my password didn't open the keyring. I finally solved
this by installing gnome-keyring-manager and deleting the default
keyring and then the first time the network manager wanted the
keyring, it said it needed to create a default keyring. I allowed
this and all was well after that.
Summary
-------
The process went remarkable well without any major problems. The
notable exceptions were:
o A bogus /var/mail directory showed up and had to be replaced with a
symlink to /var/spool/mail
o gnomedb had to be removed and reinstalled
o The F7 version of avahi was orphaned and had to be erased by hand
o My gnome keyring lost its password and had to be removed and
recreated by hand.
Thank you for a great Fedora 8 release!
--
Garry T. Williams --- +1 678 656-4579
