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November 10, 2006
Upgrading from Fedora Core 5 to Fedora Core 6
Now that Fedora Core 6 ("zod" - I'm not sure that I understand the naming policy here, given that the last release was "bordeaux") has been out for a little while, I figured it was safe to go ahead and upgrade from FC5 to FC6. My attempts to find a set of instructions on the net that worked for my particular machine came to no end, so following on from my Fedora Core 5 install notes, here are the notes I made during the process.
My first attempt at the process was with TekArtist's instructions, which suggested using the Livna repositories. However, trying to install the Livna RC6 package resulted in a complaint about needing a newer version of the fedora-release package. Confusingly, when I attempted to update the fedora-release package, yum told me there were no newer versions available. Looking in /etc/yum.repos.d/ (warning: contains strong language), I couldn't see how to bump the Fedora Core version number. (This was weird for someone more used to the Debian way of things, where a distribution upgrade is as easy as changing one line in your sources.list and doing an apt-get upgrade.)
A bit more searching gave me these instructions from Alexandre Gomes, which suggest downloading the fedora-release package and using rpm to install it. However, that package in turn relied on fedora-release-notes, which relied on fedora-release (I think; my notes are incomplete). The solution was to get both simultaneously:
This successfully updated fedora-release. The next step was to do the actual upgrade of the whole distribution! The command for this is yum -y upgrade (the -y option means "answer yes to any questions asked"). yum went off and got a lot of packages and calculated their dependencies. The process then failed, due to a conflict between the fedora-logos and redhat-artwork packages, of all things. A yum update redhat-artwork resolved that. Running the update command again, I got:
Error: autofs conflicts with kernel < 2.6.17 Error: hal conflicts with kernel < 2.6.17
Predictably enough, the next step was yum update kernel, which brought it up to 2.6.18. However, running the upgrade again resulted in the same error. So evidently some old kernel was hanging around. Investigating, I found:
[root@localhost Desktop]# yum list installed | grep kernel kernel.i686 2.6.18-1.2200.fc5 installed kernel.i686 2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 installed kernel-smp.i686 2.6.18-1.2200.fc5 installed kernel-smp.i686 2.6.15-1.2054_FC5 installed
There were indeed some old kernels that needed removing. Now, for the life of me I couldn't work out how precisely to issue the package name and version to yum in order to remove it, despite the section of the yum manual about doing precisely that, so in the end I used rpm instead, which just does what you tell it instead of trying to be friendly.
[root@localhost Desktop]# rpm -qa | grep kernel kernel-2.6.18-1.2200.fc5 kernel-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 kernel-smp-2.6.18-1.2200.fc5 kernel-smp-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5
[root@localhost Desktop]# rpm -e kernel-smp-2.6.15-1.2054_FC5 kernel-2.6.18-1.2200.fc5
Pow. Gone. I ran the upgrade command again, and... success! yum went through and upgraded about 1,400 packages. One reboot later and I was running the shiny new Fedora Core 6.
Minor niggles: One of the features of FC6 is the compiz visual-effects thing (because we all need wobbly windows and desktops that spin around on a big 3D cube). However, I couldn't get it working, apparently because of something to do with my video card. If I ever manage to, I'll document it here as well. Also, strangely, you can't get Firefox 2 from the default package list in FC6, which strikes me as bizarre for a major new OS distribution. You have to get it from the development repository, like so:
[root@localhost ~]# yum --enablerepo=development update firefox [output snipped...]Updated: firefox.i386 0:2.0-2.fc7
Complete!
Yes, it looks like I've made it to FC7 already. :)
Posted by Earle Martin at 10:11 AM |