Upgrading Linux is always an adventure. Linux distributions have clearly improved tremendously through the years, but user expectations have also increased at the same time. Once upon a time, users had to put up with repeated installations, mucking around configuration files, downloading extra bits of code, and going through all sorts of hoops and hurdles to get their Linux system going. They didn’t complain much. They weren’t the average user either, of course. Today, of course, the average Linux user is not going to tolerate that kind of experience. Users like myself, in fact, would like to draw comparisons with, say, Windows XP and Mac OS X.
Here’s my adventure of upgrading from Fedora Core 6 to Fedora 7. This wasn’t a fuss-free upgrade… I wasn’t expecting it to be fuss-free anyway. There are probably tons of other much in-depth articles about Fedora 7 installation, so here I’ll just highlight the interesting experiences in my adventure.
The installer choked on file systems that were not labeled. I had previously created some file systems “by hand” and hence had not bothered to label them. The /etc/fstab file listed the device as /dev/hda9 instead of LABEL=/misc that the Fedora 7 installer wanted to see. Ok, this is easily fixed, but I had to reboot back to the installed Fedora Core 6, then restart the installation.
Fedora 7 now labels all drives as if they were SCSI disks, so my IDE /dev/hda has now become /dev/sdb. This was no surprise since I’d already read about this quirkness. However, it was nevertheless still unsettling, particularly since I considered /dev/hda my “first disk” (I have a second SATA disk that shows up as /dev/sda in Fedora Core 6), but Fedora 7 considers it my second disk.
The installer bombed out while checking for package dependencies! It turned out I was partly to blame. I had mistakenly inserted a i386 installation CDROM when my Fedora Core 6 was installed with x86_64 architecture. Still, it would have been nice if the installer had nicely pointed out the error. As it happened, I was left to sieve through cryptic messages in the “Details” to find out what might have gone wrong.
Fedora 7 now longer tries to give a time estimate for completion of the upgrade/installation. I suppose they’ve figured out the time estimates were never accurate. The package installation progress is now just simply indicated through “X of Y packages completed” status.
When the installer is done with package installation, it displays a “Finishing upgrade process. This may take a whlie…”. Be forewarned, it is really going to take a while. For that matter, getting the installation started wasn’t snappy either.
Okay, upgrade is done, system is rebooting. Oh dear, kernel not found! After reading the error message, I realize the system was trying to boot up the old (under Fedora Core 6) kernel. Guess what? The old kernel still shows up in grub! That’s even though it didn’t exist! And if that’s not bad enough, it is the default! Now this is really quite dumb. Anyway, I know how to fix this…
First login to user account hung! The desktop never showed up. Keyboard failed to respond. Fortunately, I could SSH in from another machine, ‘init 3’, then ‘init 5’. Googling a little bit, I managed to find some information about an esd problem here. This is no good.
Ok finally got to a working desktop. Now, let’s try “yum update”. Fedora 7 is only a few days old… and we’ve already got a sizable bunch of updates. And here, it seems Fedora 7 has got itself confused. It was trying to install both pidgin i386 and x86_64 architectures, which resulted in many other dependent packages being pulled in, ultimately causing some packaging conflict, so that the update failed. Again, I can fix this.
Now, on to try the virtualization stuffs. I have both VMware Server and Qemu-KVM. Ok, both would run fine on their own, but when I try to run both VMware Server and Qemu-KVM at the same time, the system kind of locks up. The GUI is stuck even though the mouse pointer can still move around, and while I can ping the system from remote, I can’t SSH into the box. Well, ok to be fair… VMware Server is not something included in Fedora 7… perhaps it was the one not playing nice.
Anyway that’s all the updates for now 🙂
View Comment Policy