Yum upgrade from F8 to F9 with KDE desktop - installation notes
Claude Jones
cjones at levitjames.com
Mon Jun 23 02:12:49 UTC 2008
My apologies for double posting but correcting the subject with a fresh thread
seemed the best.
Maybe this might help others:
I'm starting from a Fedora 8 box that's been in continuous use since F6 using
yum upgrade to move up through each distro version - my desktop is KDE though
Gnome is also installed - I had installed the early beta packages of KDE4
from kde-redhat on this machine and had some problems, so I'd removed them.
Probably left some detritus behind, but, the box was running smoothly with no
major issues - the machine is a dual-core with 2GB ram, and my IP connection
is a 3mb/s DSL - the whole process took about three hours with a little
additional cleanup the next morning - currently, I'm typing these notes with
my newly upgraded system and I have no major issues. I use the proprietary
nVidia drivers from Freshrpms, and I had to install the latest nVidia driver
from Freshrpms along the way, which I did right after the installation of the
kernel in step 5; once I did that, the dkms package (which gets installed from
Freshrpms as a dependency to their package of the nVidia driver) took care of
building my kernel-module for the new kernel on the next reboot with no
intervention on my part. Building the nVidia kernel module adds about 15-20
seconds to booting but requires no user intervention and only happens when a
new kernel is installed.
I post this because I've always found the process of collecting all the
relevant info to do a yum upgrade a bit daunting. There is no guarantee this
will work on your machine, and I would strongly suggest you wait a spell
before trying this, to see if any of the more knowledgeable folk on this list
spot any mistakes or omissions in my procedure.
1) Download fedora 9 release rpm: here's one link
ftp://ftp.software.umn.edu/linux/fedora/releases/9/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-
release-9-2.noarch.rpm
OR http://tinyurl.com/6yv9gd
2) Use your preferred method to install the above file:
rpm -Uvh fedora-release-9-2.noarch.rpm
from a root command prompt works for me
3) Navigate to /etc/yum.repos.d and use your preferred text editor to open
each *.repo file in there; you want to examine each mirror list or baseurl
line. If they are using dollar sign symbols to indicate version and
architecture, you're good (example:
mirrorlist=http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=fedora-
debug-$releasever&arch=$basearch) - leave things as they are. Some repos may
use specific version numbers (example:
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/updates/9/i386/)
In each case like this, you need to make sure that the number right before the
/i386 is a '9' -- I didn't have to modify any of my current *.repo files but I
did have to modify my smart channels as described just above.
4) Reboot, and when the 'Grub' line appears in your upper left hand screen tap
your space bar; that should present you a list of kernels. Highlight the
topmost kernel and press the letter 'a'; that will open a command line with
that kernel line and the cursor at the end of the line; press the spacebar and
then enter the number '3' then press enter.
You will boot to a command prompt.
Log in as 'root'
5) Run 'yum update kernel' - for me this resulted in a clean install of the
latest F9 kernel along with a couple of dependent packages - it also removed a
couple of kernel modules in the process which I allowed (I happen to run the
nVidia drivers and this was related to that - after installing the latest
kernel is a good time to install the nVidia proprietary drivers from freshrpms
if you use them - see opening paragraph up above for more regarding nVidia)
6) Repeat step 4 and run yum update; in my case this produced a ton of
activity and then a failure message due to dependency issues; read the screen
carefully at this point! Remove packages that can't install due to dependency
problems with 'yum remove [name of package]' - in my case, I had to remove
compat-gcc-34-c++, aquamarine, tellico, all beryll packages, mozilla-totem-
xine, and kdebase (your removals won't be exactly the same); I had to remove
kdebase because of issues with a package called extragear-plasma that was
failing due to dependencies. That took a little research, but was easily
figured out with the help of google. This was some of the detritus left over
from my trying the early KDE4 beta referred to above.
7) Eventually, you should get to a state where the update should proceed; mine
required 1393 package updates and installs plus some removals
8) Repeat step 4; you want to rename /etc/X11/xorg.conf - I used
mv xorg.conf xorg.conf.F8 to simply rename it and take it out of the picture
(xorg.conf used to be the configuration file for the xserver but it's no
longer used and keeping the file active can introduce font issues
that prevent many programs from opening)
9) Try a normal reboot
This is not intended as a definitive method, but, was derived from a careful
read of this webpage: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq
plus reference to various posts from this mailing list. There are new tools
out there, and this may not be the best way to upgrade, but, having limited
time, and being familiar with this general process, I chose to go ahead this
way rather than investigate preupgrade and other methods I've heard reference
to.
One last note: I find the latest improvements to KDE4 to have resolved most of
the major issues I had with the first releases, and look forward to the
restoration of various functions that didn't get in yet. I'm running the
version that is made available from kde-redhat-unstable currently at 4.0.83
--
Claude Jones
Brunswick, MD, USA
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