Tag: upgrade

Fedora 18 : Upgrading from Fedora 17…

I’ve just got to the end of a real upgrade of a Fedora 17 server to Fedora 18. The basic process goes like this.

  • Download the Fedora 18 ISO.
  • Update your current Fedora 17 system by issuing the “yum update” command and restart once it is complete.
  • Install the “fedup” package. “yum –enablerepo=updates-testing install fedup”
  • Run the fedup command pointing it to the Fedora 18 ISO you downloaded. “fedup-cli –iso /home/user/fedora-18.iso –debuglog=fedupdebug.log”
  • Check for errors in the log and correct if found.
  • Reboot the machine and select the “System Upgrade” option from the Grub menu.
  • Wait!

The system came up OK after this, but there are some gotchas. The first thing I did on completion was to run a “yum update” and lots of things were broken. Why? Well, after a lot of messing around and manually updating individual packages I finally figured out:

  1. Google Chrome, Skype and VirtualBox were all holding on to F17 versions of packages so yum was not able to update them.
  2. I also had a bunch of packages from the RPM Fusion repository that seemed to confuse things. If you are using that repository I suggest you manually update it using these commands.

    wget http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-18.noarch.rpm
    rpm -Uvh rpmfusion-free-release-18.noarch.rpm

  3. The dropbox repository is failing, so add “enabled=0” to the “/etc/yum.repos.d/dropbox.repo” file.

So IMHO, when you are going to do an upgrade, I would advise to remove any packages that didn’t come from the Fedora repository before starting, or be prepared to spend a few hours cleaning up afterwards. If I had stuck to just packages from the Fedora repository I think the upgrade would have been seamless. As it is, it was a bit of a pain, but now it’s all good.

I think I will have a little rest before trying another. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Update: I just did an upgrade to another machine. By taking my own advice and cleaning up first it was really easy. 🙂

VirtualBox 4.1.18 Released…

VirtualBox 4.1.18 has been released. It’s a maintenance release and the downloads and changelogs are in the normal places.

It’s been about 2 years since I switched across to VirtualBox (when the shared virtual disks feature was introduced). In that time there have been loads of updates to the product. In the same time frame, VMware Server has had zero releases. I still get a lot of people writing to me about issues with VMware Server installations. I immediately tell them to ditch it. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I’ve got nothing against VMware’s paid-for offerings, which do get updates. I just don’t see the point in using them when VirtualBox is free and works great for me.

Fedora 17 : My upgrade hell…

It’s been a few days since the final release of Fedora 17. I’ve been running it on VMs since the alpha release, but the day after the final release I decided to upgrade a real Fedora 16 machine. That’s where all the fun started…

I’ve now attempted Fedora 16 -> 17 upgrades on two physical servers and both have been destroyed by the process. In both cases, I had to do a fresh install, which worked cleanly and left a fully functioning installation. Perhaps I’m just very unlucky, but with a record of 0 for 2, my conclusion is that the upgrade process on Fedora 17 sucks so much ass it’s untrue.

As followers of the blog know, I try to keep my host machines pretty clean and do anything of significance in VirtualBox VMs. As a result, the recovery of both systems has been fine, if a little slow. In both cases, I did a clean install, then copied back all the VMs and that was pretty much it.

In conclusion, if you are planning on doing an upgrade to Fedora 17, rather than a clean install, I would think very carefully!

As for  Fedora 17 itself, it feels like Fedora 16 with a different background.

Cheers

Tim…