With Red Hat dropping support for Red Hat Linux (duh!), it was only a matter of time before I made a move to a new distro – when it comes to running an internet-exposed server, a little guy like me has no choice – I HAVE to run an up-to-date auto-patched distro. With cyrus playing the role of the proverbial straw, I decided to upgrade (sidegrade?) to Fedora. Read on for all the gory details – just kidding, it’s not that bad. In fact, in retrospect, yum made it downright smooth.
First, a note on mirrors. The instructions I was following recommended giving Red Hat a break by using one of the many fedora mirrors available. I dutifully selected an aleron mirror, which wasn’t too far away and had been blazing fast in the past. However, during my adventures, I found that the mirror wasn’t fully up to date, and that caused me a few dependency headaches I could have done without. I recommend you use the default yum config which points right to redhat.com. Sorry, Red Hat, but we’re talking about our babies, here! 
The big plan was to jump straight from Red Hat 9 to Fedora Core 2, using
rpm -Uvh yum-2.0.7-1.1.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh fedora-release-2-4.i386.rpm
yum upgrade
Oh if life were only so simple. :> Dependency problems followed, I tried to fix:
yum remove ‘redhat-config-*’
yum remove imap
yum remove pine
yum remove cadaver
But they kept coming on strong. I took a deep breath and a step back. Conclusion: better go Red Hat 9 -> Fedora Core 1, then Fedora Core 1 -> Fedora Core 2.
rpm -e yum
rpm -Uvh yum-2.0.4-2.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh fedora-release-1.3-i386.rpm –force –nodeps
yum upgrade
Cool, only one dependency problem came up:
yum remove jdkgcj
Fixed that, and FC1 dropped right into place. Feeling emboldened, and not wanting to have to REALLY set up FC1 before jumping to FC2, I decided that I would upgrade right then and there to FC2 before rebooting, while I still had a working network connection etc.:
rpm -e yum
rpm -Uvh yum-2.0.7-1.1.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh fedora-release-2-4.i386.rpm
yum upgrade
There were only a few more snags to work through before it decided to roll on:
rpm -e libmrproject-devel
rpm -e db4-java
rpm -e galeon
Then it was off to the RC2 races. OK, so far so good. Rebooted and… no network connection. I don’t remember the details, but I had to tinker around with my ethernet driver before I got it working again – it’s frightening having to troubleshoot gear with NO INTERNET CONNECTION, it was like the good old days!
Once that was resolved, there were only a couple small snags left. The first odd thing, and correct me if I’m wrong here, was that FC2 seemed to install two kernels, a 2.4 and a 2.6. When I boot with the 2.4 I’m fine, but the 2.6 still has basic hardware problems (X doesn’t recognize the mouse, for starters). Perhaps after a few more “yum update”‘s 2.6 will settle down.
The final problem was that my built-from-source apache wouldn’t fire up. I dug up and polished off my handy-dandy
Peace!
