Because my life was too care free, and being a glutton for punishment, I decided to upgrade from Fedora Core 7 to 8.
Unfortunately, the latest distribution doesn't fit on CDs any more, and I don't have a DVD reader in the machine to be upgraded. So I decided to build a boot disk on a cd, and do it from the network. So I build the CD, for x86_64 (the machine is running on an Athlon 64), boot with it, and everything is going fine until it's about ready to start checking for dependencies. It gives me a message (from memory): "You are about to upgrade to x86_64, but your previous installation is i386. It is likely that this upgrade will fail. Do you want to continue?"
I scratch my head. I'm pretty sure that the last install was a 64 bit one. Maybe they mean that it will fail if I don't have a 64-bit processor, but I do, so I tell it to go ahead. It starts checking dependencies, and the bar starts to move slowly to the right. Until it's a quarter of the way, at which point it quits moving. I go away and come back in an hour. Still no motion. I go away and come back after a couple hours. Still stuck. I go to bed. I get up in the morning. No more progress. It finally exits with an error.
I try it from a different FTP site. No joy.
OK, if it thinks that it's an i386 installation, I'll just update that, and worry about making it 64 bit later. Burn the disk. Boot.
This time, when I get to the same place, I get the following message: "You are about to upgrade to i386, but your previous installation is x86_64. It is likely that this upgrade will fail. Do you want to continue?"
Note the subtle difference from the previous error message.
OK, the installer is schizo. When I try to install i386, it thinks it's replacing x86_64, and when I try to install x86_64, it thinks it's replacing i386. I tell it to go ahead. I get the same result--it hangs during the dependency check, at exactly the same place.
Any Fedora gurus out there with any suggestions? (Pete Zaitcev, I'm looking at you...)
While I can't really help with this problem, I'd suggest a few things: first, buy a DVD burner: the $30 that it'll cost you is well worth the reduction in annoyance; and second, wait three weeks for the release of Fedora 9; and third, do a reinstall rather than an upgrade. (You do have your /home on a separate partition don't you? if not, just back everything up using your nice new DVD burner and repartition during the install.)
(1) What the first guy said, Reinstall from fresh.
(2) Debian. Debian. Debian. Debian. Does this suggest something?
Debian. Debian. Debian. Debian. Does this suggest something?
[scratching head...]
So...you're saying that I should try Suse?
This reminds me of those useful posts where someone has a Windows problem, and half of the commenters tell him to get a Mac.
I've actually had fewer installation headaches with Fedora than with the Debian-based Ubuntu. But I always make it a practice to re-install from scratch.
I keep /home on separate partition, and I keep two OS-sized partitions around, so that I can dual boot until I'm sure that there won't be any problems.
The biggest problem about getting help with linux issues is that the first answer you get is always "Why are you using fedora/ubuntu/etc??? You should be using mandrake/slackware/whatever!"
I would attempt to update with yum at that point. Install new fedora-release (which updates /etc/yum.repos.d/), kill extra services just in case, then "yum clean all", "yum upgrade" and voila...
Since F8, yum and Anaconda share the backend, so depsolving itself is the same. But the key difference with Anaconda is that the process is more transparent, since you're doing it in a functional system and it's text based. You can e-mail me terminal log, for instance. You can retry it, edit any issues in configuration files, you can know what packages are offending and delete them, and so on.
The downside is the amount of disk space this takes.
You are in a twisty maze of error messages, all alike.
Rand wrote:
This reminds me of those useful posts where someone has a Windows problem, and half of the commenters tell him to get a Mac.
IF Windows was built on the Mac kernel and packaging system instead of just taking inspiration from the user interface, the analogy would work.
Debian was the original combined packaging and version dependancy system for linux systems that really worked worth a damn. Ubuntu has taken what they could of it and built an OS around it. Suse and Red Hat, AFAICT, have tried to adapt the various features of apt to yum. But there's only one original apt.
Rand,
If your upgrade failed during dependency checking and nothing was installed then it may be the case that you have a mix of 32bit and 64bit packages installed and the installer is choking on that. It shouldn't but it might be.
I've done sequential upgrade installs with Fedora several times, but after FC6 decided to go the reinstall route. Your best path really is to follow what Electro Dude said, buy a DVD burner, back up your home and reinstall.
If you have lots of games or other 3rd party software installed in /usr/local/ that you don't want to re-install you can try Pete Zaitcev's upgrade method, but you should still backup your home in case it all goes bad and you need to blow the install away.