Upgrading from FC6 to Fedora 7 with yum

Now that Fedora 7 has been release it is time to upgrade from that crusty old Fedora Core 6. Note that they have removed the “Core” from the name so a few things have changed with the paths used in yum. Last year I did a post on how to upgrade from FC5 to FC6 and this upgrade happened on the first box I used for that.

  1. Before you start see the note after these steps about checking for disk labels
  2. yum update
  3. yum clean all
  4. I repeated update and clean all a second time to make sure everything got updated
  5. I then ran the command:
    [code lang=”text”]
    rpm -Uhv http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Fedora/x86_64/os/Fedora/fedora-release-7-3.noarch.rpm http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Fedora/x86_64/os/Fedora/fedora-release-notes-7.0.0-1.noarch.rpm
    [/code]
  6. I then found that I had to move fedora-development.repo and fedora-updates.repo out of /etc/yum.repos.d/ and replace them with fedora-development.repo.rpmnew and fedora-updates.repo.rpmnew. I also needed to remove a custom repo I had but no longer used so I didn’t take time to figure out why it needed to be removed.
  7. I then did a yum -y update and waited
  8. After a good wait another X server was started so you may think about not doing the update while running under X. Luckily it was able to start on another console so all was ok. Now it was time for a reboot.
  9. After the reboot I had to fix up some NVidia issues but overall it looks like it upgraded without a problem

Notes on disk labels:

There are a few things listed in the release notes under Upgrade Related Issues.

The first was to make sure all your drives have labels. You can do this by running the command “/sbin/blkid” and then checking that each line that is not part of the LVM system has a LABEL entry. If you need to add a label to a drive use the “/sbin/e2label” command and then edit your /etc/fstab to use the label on boot instead of the device.

[code lang=”text”]
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
[/code]

You don’t need to label LVM drives since the LVM keeps track of the drives it uses on its own. The only drive I had on a stock install that wasn’t under the LVM was /boot and it had a label already.

After you upgrade they sugest running the following command and then upgrading anything that has a date before the upgrade date:

[code lang=”text”]
rpm -qa –last > RPMS_by_Install_Time.txt
[/code]

[tags]linux, fedora[/tags]

93 thoughts on “Upgrading from FC6 to Fedora 7 with yum

  1. Pingback: NetworksAreMadeOfString » Fedora 7 Related Link Dump

  2. Alan

    Hi Carson
    I’m fairly new to the Fedora OS and all it’s commands. If you could email me the whole process and commands so I can do the yum upgrade from Fedora Core 6 to Fedora 7 I would greatly appreciate it.

    Thanks
    Alan

  3. Chris

    @alan

    he just did, read the article and you’ll find everything you need in order to upgrade from one to the other.

    I didn’t need them, cause I’d already done it, but it was nice to see someone else who did it and had 0 problems, well, depending on whether you see a 2 hour download as a problem or not :D

    chris

  4. Mike

    This is a great post for users new to Fedora & Yum. I used the instructions on this site to upgrade from FC5 to FC6. Thanks for taking the time.

  5. Ronan

    Carson,

    Thank you so much for this useful information. I successfully upgraded two servers from FC6 to FC7 via yum. I followed all the steps but have to manually upgrade python, yum, rpm and ncurses packages before I executed ‘yum -y update’. After that everything was just perfect. I still have to test the rest though but I think no problems will occur.

    Thanks again man…

  6. lim

    Do you know if it’s possible to upgrade directly from FC5 to 7 with yum? Or two upgrades 5->6->7 are required?

  7. lim

    Ok, solved swap problem:
    swapoff -a
    mkswap -L SWAP /dev/
    swapon -a

    Then swap partition can also be mounted in /etc/fstab by
    LABEL=SWAP

  8. lim

    for ext2/ext3: e2label /dev/mdX LABEL
    for reiserfs (partition must be unmounted): reiserfstune -L LABEL /dev/mdX
    for swap: mkswap -L SWAP /dev/mdX

  9. Jean-Lou Dupont

    Your post is fabulous!
    I have one question though: where do we find the file data for “fedora-development.repo.rpmnew” and “fedora-updates.repo.rpmnew” ?

    Thanks.

  10. saro

    I upgraded successfully from FC6 to FC7. I do have the following issues.

    1) Nvidia driver loads up but Beryl doesn’t. It says “Root window size (2560/1024) is bigger then maximum texture size (2048×2048)”. It was working before the upgrade.

    2) There still are some *.fc6 packages (some 200 of them) and when I tried to batch remove them, many fc7 are also getting removed due to dependency issues. I didnt go thru with it but I would like a machine with just fc7 packages instead of a hybrid :[

    thanks for the post !

    Saro

  11. carson Post author

    Saro,

    I have been getting that same Beryl error for months now. I assume you have dual screens? I upgraded Beryl some time ago and it started producing that error. I found a thread at some point saying they had opened a bug to fix it because it was something they had hard coded since they figured nobody would have a screen that large. I haven’t gone back to Beryl since then but it seems like something they would get fixed soon.

  12. Dennis

    I have successfully upgrade but I can’t boot from Fedora7. However, I can boot from fedora core 6 which is selected from boot menu list.

    I paste the related information:
    ==========================================
    # /sbin/blkid
    /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol01: TYPE=”swap”
    /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00: UUID=”828418eb-aa98-4848-887d-b7bbcea8ebde” SEC_TYPE=”ext2″ TYPE=”ext3″
    /dev/hdb1: TYPE=”ntfs”
    /dev/hdb5: TYPE=”ntfs”
    /dev/hdb6: LABEL=”D DISK” UUID=”2C5C-1D93″ TYPE=”vfat”
    /dev/hdd1: LABEL=”/boot” UUID=”c500cfbc-4a8d-4520-be26-1f4c180e4188″ SEC_TYPE=”ext2″ TYPE=”ext3″
    /dev/hdd2: TYPE=”swap”
    /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01: TYPE=”swap”
    /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00: UUID=”828418eb-aa98-4848-887d-b7bbcea8ebde” SEC_TYPE=”ext2″ TYPE=”ext3″
    ############################################

    # cat /etc/fstab
    /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 / ext3 defaults 1 1
    LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2
    devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
    tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
    proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
    sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
    /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 swap swap defaults 0 0
    ===============================================
    # cat /boot/grub/grub.conf
    # grub.conf generated by anaconda
    #
    # Note that you do not have to rerun grub after making changes to this file
    # NOTICE: You have a /boot partition. This means that
    # all kernel and initrd paths are relative to /boot/, eg.
    # root (hd1,0)
    # kernel /vmlinuz-version ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
    # initrd /initrd-version.img
    #boot=/dev/hdb
    default=0
    timeout=5
    splashimage=(hd1,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
    hiddenmenu
    title Fedora (2.6.21-1.3194.fc7)
    root (hd1,0)
    kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
    initrd /initrd-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7.img
    title Fedora Core (2.6.20-1.2952.fc6)
    root (hd1,0)
    kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.20-1.2952.fc6 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet
    initrd /initrd-2.6.20-1.2952.fc6.img
    title Windows XP
    rootnoverify (hd0,0)
    chainloader +1
    ===========================================

    I can boot from fc6 but not fedora 7. of course I can boot windows XP.
    Looking forward to hearing from you
    Thanks in advance!

  13. marc

    great job indeed!
    i’m attempting to upgrade a “dedibox” dedicated distant server from FC5 to FC 6 (using your previous howto: worked perfectly!)
    and now from FC6 to F7.
    The server is minimalistic: no apps, no X server, no desktop, remote ssh access by putty, just scratch from the box… -> I shouldn’t have any exotic driver problem.
    I have successfully labeled my drives using lim’s tip, installed the new repo.rpm (why x86_64!!?) and launched yum update.
    boiled for a while and got :

    ——————————————–
    –> Processing Dependency: mkinitrd >= 6.0.9-7.1 for package: kernel
    –> Finished Dependency Resolution
    Error: Missing Dependency: mkinitrd >= 6.0.9-7.1 is needed by package kernel
    ——————————————–
    op aborted…

    trying and trying I found that mkinitrd-6.0.9-7.1.i386.rpm needs nash-6.0.9-7.1.i386.rpm

    (old nash rough uninstall removes FC5 & FC6 kernel…)

    I tried rpm -U but

    ——————————————–
    # rpm -U mkinitrd-6.0.9-7.1.i386.rpm
    erreur: Dépendances requises:
    nash = 6.0.9-7.1 est nécessaire pour mkinitrd-6.0.9-7.1.i386
    # rpm -U nash-6.0.9-7.1.i386.rpm
    erreur: Dépendances requises:
    nash = 6.0.9-5 est nécessaire pour (déja installé) mkinitrd-6.0.9-5.i386
    ——————————————–

    any idea ?

  14. Mike

    Thanks for posting these instructions. Everything was going smoothly until the “yum -y update” step.

    –> Processing Dependency: mkinitrd >= 6.0.9-7.1 for package: kernel
    –> Finished Dependency Resolution
    Error: Missing Dependency: mkinitrd >= 6.0.9-7.1 is needed by package kernel

    The latest mkinitrd in the yum repository is
    6.0.9-5, which I have. It looks like the 6.0.9-7.1 is still being tested and was submitted two days ago: http://fcp.surfsite.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=39098&forum=12

    How can I get around this problem easily ?

  15. marc

    thanks a lot for your reactivity mike and for the job you do

    i’ll give it a try and feed back soon

    marc

  16. Abhishek Bhat

    Hi Carson
    Below is the terminal output when I run ym update on my FC6 machine:

    –> Populating transaction set with selected packages. Please wait.
    —> Package libpurple.i386 0:2.0.1-1.fc6 set to be updated
    —> Package busybox.i386 1:1.2.0-4 set to be updated
    –> Running transaction check
    –> Processing Dependency: faad2 Processing Dependency: libmeanwhile.so.1 for package: libpurple
    –> Restarting Dependency Resolution with new changes.
    –> Populating transaction set with selected packages. Please wait.
    —> Package meanwhile.i386 0:1.0.2-3.fc6 set to be updated
    –> Running transaction check
    –> Processing Dependency: faad2 Finished Dependency Resolution
    –> Populating transaction set with selected packages. Please wait.
    —> Package kernel.i686 0:2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 set to be erased
    —> Package kernel-devel.i686 0:2.6.18-1.2798.fc6 set to be erased
    –> Running transaction check
    –> Processing Dependency: faad2 Finished Dependency Resolution
    Error: Missing Dependency: faad2

  17. Abhishek Bhat

    I guess my previous post was too long to fit everything in.

    My question is how to get around this missing dependency problem in this particular case and also in general because I am sure after resolving this one there will be more !!!

  18. ankon

    Did a upgrade from FC6 to F7, worked more or less without problems (x86_64).

    Some notes:
    – to get rid of the .fc6 packages, i did a package-cleanup –orphans | grep -v ‘Setting up’ | (more grep -v for packages still needed) | rpm -e. Worked fine so far, and according to the release note some FC6 packages haven’t been name-changed because nothing else was updated.
    – Got ugly java errors again, referring to ld-linux-x86-64.so.2+0x91bd (offset may vary). If that happens, running /etc/cron.daily/prelink helps.

    Thanks for this post!

  19. marc

    retried everything using
    “yum install mkinitrd –enablerepo=updates-testing”
    before
    yum update

    … worked perfectly !

    uname -a says
    Linux xxxxxxx 2.6.21-1.3228.fc7 #1 SMP Tue Jun 12 15:37:31 EDT 2007 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

    great job Mike and thanks for your help

    see you for next upgrade !

  20. saro

    Hi carson,

    I fixed the nvidia “Root window size (2560/1024) is bigger then maximum texture size (2048×2048)” problem.

    I had to remove the nvidia drivers and install nvidia-96xx drivers which support AIGLX

    Now Beryl is working fine and I am a happy man ;)

    Saro

  21. Terry

    Sure wish I would have seen this about 5 minutes ago!

    I am in the middle of a DVD upgrade (aka precurser to fresh a install) from FC6 to F7.

    Pray for me.

  22. Dave

    Error: Unable to satisfy dependencies
    Error: Package mkinitrd needs nash = 5.1.19.0.3-1, this is not available.
    Error: Package mkinitrd needs libparted-1.8.so.2, this is not available.
    Any clues?

  23. Mick

    Hi Carson —

    After wading through a whole river of crap trying to install F7 from DVD, net, etc., I went back to FC6 until I found your instructions and subsequent addendums from everyone else tonight. I’m now in the middle of an upgrade…

    And Terry, I pray that you got through your DVD upgrade – if not, we can weep together…

    Mick

  24. Fr3d

    Thanks for the guide – worked fine, apart from one problem:

    I get the following error while trying to boot the F7 kernel (the old FC6 kernel works fine):
    /bin/nash: error while loading shared libraries: libm.so.6: cannot open object file: No such file or directory
    (pic: http://img236.imageshack.us/img236/2651/panicre5.jpg )

    libm.so.6 exists, as shown here:

    root@thrawn:/lib# ll | grep libm-
    -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 216536 2007-05-24 12:20 libm-2.6.so
    lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 11 2007-06-23 22:05 libm.so.6 -> libm-2.6.so

    Any ideas?

  25. Richard

    Have you checked that libm is still in your path statement? that one is usually caused by a missing path in you env.

  26. Richard

    Keep an eye out for Clamav bugs. You currently can’t use the version on Crash-hat with fc7, because fc7 removes libcurl.so.3. Default clamav-0.90-2 from fedora does work.

  27. sgl

    well I just upgraded with pretty much no problem at all, on a vanilla Dell desktop (i386). Everything seems to be running fine so far.

    Had to yum remove 4suite kdemultimedia rhnlib and clamav to get ‘yum -y update’ to do its stuff. I never use them anyway and had no idea they were installed.

    Also I got a bit confused with instruction (6) as there were no rpmnew files in my yum.repos.d after updating fedora-release, and in fact the fedora-release update didn’t change my repo files at all. I first moved them out of yum.repos.d and then realized they were okay and moved them back in. ymmv.

  28. Zoltan Arpadffy

    Hello,

    I have tried to upgrade my FC6 to version 7.
    … but I can not upgrade because of missing dependency.


    –> Finished Dependency Resolution
    Error: Missing Dependency: libgcj = 4.1.2-12 is needed by package libgcj-src

    From other side:
    # rpm -q libgcj
    libgcj-4.1.2-13.fc6

    This means that FC6 has a newer package then Fedora 7.

    What should I do in order to make the upgrade as smooth as possible?

    Thank you in advance

    Regards,
    Z

  29. Zoltan Arpadffy

    (continue)

    … I have solved the problem above with downloading and installing libgcj-src-4.1.2-13.fc6. That allowed me to contimue tha upgrade.

    There were still some problems with conflicting files, but removing older files solved that issue as well.

    Also on yet another box there was also problem with libgcj… but this tme with shareble object version. I got a missing dependency for libgcj.so.8rh that does not even exist yet in i386 architecture (just in x86_64) – well, I erased some 5-6 -java packages that was dependent on that and the upgrade continued.

    It is strange that it worked for you all smooth…

    To be honest I have used redhat and later fedora distibutions since 1995 and I could not make a smooth upgrade – not even once.

    Regards,
    Z

  30. Zoltan Arpadffy

    … and one last note.

    From two boxes that I have upgraded one booted up OK (except that the F7 kernel changed hda device to sda for some reason)… but another box fails with F7 kernel with kernel panic (can not find /dev/root ???)
    With old FC6 kernel it boots OK.

    Any ideas?

    Regards,
    Z

  31. Taihlo

    I have found that with the change in the naming of Hard disks in F7 there are a few other issues, such as you can’t boot a system that only has SATA Hard disks without a kernel panic… Otherwise, I would have upgraded my little box 3 weeks ago!

    Great guide though!

  32. Who Cares

    Are you sure the initial rpm -Uvh links are correct? As far as I understand EC2 does not support 64-bit images. Someone will get thrown off by that.

  33. neo

    What if we have a system under Reiserfs and wish to upgrade from FC6 to F7 through yum. There are no appropriate tool to label reiserfs partition when it’s mounter. The problem is only with the ATA disks. Extract from FC site “Use of /dev/hdX is deprecated on i386 and and x86_64 for IDE drives, and has changed to /dev/sdX except on PPC”.See note about the importance of labeling devices for upgrades from FC6. Nothing was provided to tackle with partition Reiserfs

  34. upgrader

    Already anyone with a successful FC5 -> F7 upgrade without going via FC6? Or should I go via FC6

  35. Allen

    Nearly flawless! I had two problems which I’ll note here in case anybody else encounters them:

    1. When I ran “yum -y update” it was upset about dependencies relating to libgcj and libFLAC. Couldn’t quickly figure out why but resolved this by manually downloading the proper FC7 packages and installing them with “rpm -U –nodeps –force”. After this I was able to run the yum command successfully.

    2. After the reboot, I had NVidia issues as well, quite possibly the same as carson’s. My steps to resolve this were first running “sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-9755-pkg1.run”. Once that completed, I had to do the following:

    cp -rp /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/* /usr/lib/xorg/modules

    X came right up after that.

    Oh, #3 discovered just now. Thunderbird wouldn’t start, had to:

    chmod 755 /usr/lib/thunderbird-2.0.0.5

    Hope this helps, thanks for the instructions!

    Allen

  36. Zoltan Arpadffy

    Hello,

    I would like to add a finale note to all my FC6->F7 upgrade.

    As you could read, it was not smooth at all but at the end I was able to boot into my box with F7 kernels.

    The key was:
    1. label all partitions that are not labeled.
    2. in fstab use just LABELs.
    3. edit grub.conf to use boot from LABEL=/

    This is not straightforward from the documentation and everybody who upgraded older FC distributions will face such problems.

    Specially my old box that went through RH 7.3->8->9->FC3->FC4->FC5->FC6->F7 upgrades with same partitions! :)

    … but as I told you, not even one went smooth. Wonder, have RH and Fedora folk tried yum updates at all.

    OK, I know that it is not reccomended nor supported, but as we can see here, there is a huge demand for such updates – therfore Fedora should change the approach if they want to keep the leading position. You know, Debian and recently Ubuntu have never made such troubles during (dselect) updates.

    Regards,
    Z

  37. Jonathan

    I’m running into some problems. I upgraded python, python-libs, python-devel, rpm, rpm-python, python-urlgrabber and yum manually. Then I try to run yum -y upgrade,
    It says
    sqlite3.DatabaseError: Older version of yum sqlite
    Then I manually updated sqlite and it still give me that.

  38. Fedora 6 Upgrader

    Dave (at entry 28), assuming you haven’t fixed this yet ….

    I had the same problem – seems to be a multilib issue if you’re running x86-64. Try this:

    Remove any and all of the i386 RPM versions of parted, mkinitrd and nash (you may not have all). Then re-run your yum upgrade.

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