Fedora Update

Upgrading Fedora Core 5 to Fedora Core 6

This time I decided to really heed the good advice and think about what needs backing up before starting the upgrade:

  • I backed up my home directory and my subversion repositories using rsync to my second computer.
  • I backed up my pictures to CDs.
  • I updated my subversion working directory on my laptop using svn update.

Also, I decided to do the upgrade when I had enough time, meaning not after work late at night.

Procedure

  1. Download all the iso images of the FC6 release (including the rescue CD) and check the MD5 sums.
  2. Insert the first FC6 CD.
  3. Start the installation program using ENTER. This starts the installation program in graphical mode.
  4. Choose your upgrade settings. The system recommends that you run a physical disk check for the installation CDs. I did this for the first installation CD, but since this took quite a long time, I decided to skip this step for the other installation CDs. I thought that if one of the other CDs was damaged, I could download a new ISO image and burn a new CD on my second computer.
  5. Start the upgrade. The system starts checking your system.

Note: Checking the dependencies between the software packages to be upgraded or installed may take a long time – without the progress meter showing that the check is still running.

Because the progress meter didn't budge from 0% for 20 minutes, I aborted the upgrade. I thought it was maybe because my old computer didn't have enough memory, so I started the upgrade again, this time in text mode by entering linux text The first steps indeed went swifter, but when checking the dependencies, the system this time displayed an error message No handlers could be found for logger yum.YumBase and seemed to freeze. I aborted the upgrade again, tried again a few times with different kernel parameters, but to no avail.

I then did what I should have done much earlier – looked up the error message on the internet. And it turned out I was not the only one having that problem. Others had encountered it as well, and advised to just ignore the error message and be patient.

I tried again, leaving the computer to itself for 1 1/2 hours. And it worked! So it wasn't an error after all, but just an awful user interface (giving about the worst feedback to the user you could imagine – a cryptic error message and no indication of the installation progress).

  1. Update your system using yum update

This took another 40 minutes.

Because of missing dependencies, I had to uninstall several packages using yum remove <package_name> and to exclude several packages and disable repositories using yum --exclude=<package_name> --disablerepo=<repository_name> update.

After the update went through, I reinstalled some of the packages I had previously uninstalled using yum install <package_name>.

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