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. 🙂

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.