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!
