Upgrading Fedora Core 3 to Fedora Core 4

From FedoraNEWS.ORG

Posted by Thomas Chung on 2005-06-15 (updated on 2005-06-21)

Warning: The following method is completely unsupported by the Fedora Project.

See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq for most up-to-date information.

Table of contents
1 Yum Upgrade FAQ
2 FC3 -> FC4
3 Known Problems
4 Reported Problems

Yum Upgrade FAQ

  • Using the method outlined in the following installation guide is recommended for all users.
  • http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/fedora-install-guide-en/
  • Having a backup of your existing data is always a good idea before performing any upgrade.
  • Note: This option should potentially used only by advanced users.

Common problems upgrading from one release to the next with yum:

FC3 -> FC4

  • make sure you're on the latest version of yum for FC3: 
yum update yum
  • Download fedora-release for FC4: 
wget http://yourmirrorhere/pub/fedora/linux/core/4/$yourarch/os/Fedora/RPMS/fedora-release-4-2.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh /path/to/fedora-release-4-2.noarch.rpm
yum update ( This will start the upgradation process to FC4)

In general the upgrade just works - sometimes 3rd party pkgs get conflicted but you can watch and ask about those on a per-package basis.

Some problems you might encounter:

Known Problems

  • Postgres database in FC4 has a newer incompatible format from the previous versions. Manual dump and restoration is required if you using this database. Look at the postgres documentation for more details on this.
  • kernel requires kernel-utils (or vice-versa) run: 
yum update kernel
reboot
yum remove kernel-2.6.11\*FC3\*
yum upgrade
reboot
  • Takes forever and a day and hangs at: 
Reading repository metadata in from local files

This means you have too much crap in your rpmdb and it's taking a while to go through it. Check out how many kernels you have installed: rpm -q kernel kernel-smp and remove the old ones you may also try running: rpm --rebuilddb and see if it helps any. I've found that removing old kernels and rebuilding the rpmdb helped this problem.

  • x86_64 upgrade requires removal of certain i386 packages before update 
yum remove perl.i386
TODO: Add list of bonobo i386 packages to remove here
  • Error: Missing Dependency: libpython2.3.so.1.0 is needed by package koffice koffice was removed from Fedora Core and not moved to extras - so there's no way to complete an upgrade to FC4 without removing it. run: 
yum remove koffice

then your update should complete.

  • x86_64 systems seems to hang during "Running Transaction Test" Seems related to Bug 155730 (http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=155730) -- Maybe a update to the "rpm-4.3.3-3.0.fc3" (currently in updates-testing) might solve this. Ugly workaround (to be done as root): 
: > /var/log/lastlog

Reported Problems

I'm finding that even trying to upgrade yum i have problems with openoffice due to the package name changes. I have: 

libdb_cxx-4.2.so needed by openoffice.org-libs
libedataserver.so.3 needed by openoffice.org
libebook.so.8 needed by openoffice.org

Looks like I'll need to manually install openoffice.org-core to take care of those

Source: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq

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