fc2 upgrade to fc5
Kevin Kofler
kevin.kofler at chello.at
Fri Jul 7 22:08:15 UTC 2006
Jonathan Carpenter <jonathan.carpenter <at> gmail.com> writes:
> I have an old fc2 server that is in production running
sendmail,dhcpd,webmin,webmail I am wanting to upgrade to fc5 but I am afraid
this may cause problems. Has there been any problems with any upgrade like
this?
I did an upgrade from FC2 to FC5 on an old (PII 266) laptop this week. The
issues encountered:
* My non-RAID hardware was misdetected as a RAID, which gave an "invalid
partion table on device mapper/[some unintelligible letter combination]" error
which wouldn't go away. The fix was to pass nodmraid on the kernel command
line. That's probably an FC5/hardware problem unrelated to FC2 though.
* Don't try using text mode with ISOs on the hard disk, that won't work
(there's already a bug filed about that in RH Bugzilla).
* Anaconda hangs during "Preparing packages for installation":
- Passing selinux=0 on the kernel command line helps (maybe because it reduces
RAM consumption, maybe because SELinux is causing some of the hangs, I don't
know). It got rid of the hang during the first ISO for me so I could get
packages installed before it hung again and restart the installer at that point
to get it to complete.
- Also worth trying: acpi=off noapic nolapic, and if you aren't using LVM also
nolvm.
- Restarting the installer after a hang works (at least it did for me), as long
as something was installed before the hang. Luckily, the "preparing" stage is
the one where hangs don't cause a big mess of duplicate packages.
* After install, the kernel would panic immediately with "Attempting to kill
init". I found SELinux to be the offender, it probably needs a relabeling. (I
don't need SELinux, so I didn't bother investigating further.) Booting with
selinux=0 works.
* I had some duplicate packages (librsvg2 and rhythmbox) due to the postun
scriptlet of the old package failing. The most reliable fix (making sure you
end up with a complete version of the new package) is:
rpm -e --noscripts packagename-theoldversion
rpm -e --nodeps packagename-thenewversion
yum install packagename
WARNING: Don't do that with an essential package like glibc! Removing that can
really hose your system. In that case, instead of rpm -e --nodeps and yum
install, use:
wget http://some.mirror/criticalpackage-thenewversion.arch.rpm
rpm -e --nodeps --justdb criticalpackage-thenewversion
rpm -ivh --force criticalpackage-thenewversion.arch.rpm
Luckily, I didn't have duplicates of critical packages.
* You'll undoubtedly end up with broken dependencies due to packages dropped
from the distribution, packages moved to Extras, packages installed from
Fedora.us (the old Extras) or third-party repositories and so on. You'll find
Synaptic is a huge help to clean up the mess (it will upgrade what is
upgradable (e.g. Extras packages) and remove what isn't, it also shows you
which packages have been completely dropped (are in none of the repositories)
so you can remove them if you don't need them), you can get the latest version
(with multilib and repomd support) using:
yum install synaptic
If you don't have X11 on that server, you can use the command-line apt-rpm
instead:
yum install apt
Someone on one of the Fedora lists also packaged aptitude (a text-mode apt
frontend), check the archives.
* Be prepared for several hundred MB (I'd estimate around a GB) of post-release
updates (to fetch after the Anaconda upgrade). If this is a command-line only
server, i.e. you don't have X11/GNOME/KDE/OpenOffice.org installed, it should
be less though.
Kevin Kofler
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