Upgrading Red Hat 9 to Fedora Core

I'm currently doing upgrading Redhat 9 to Fedora Core on my work PC due to problems with multi-processor machines outlined in Sun's Java JDK 1.5 release notes.

I'm getting Tomcat hangs and intermittent JVM segfaults so decided it's time to get shot of the aging RH9 install on our dual-P4 server.

The process should be quite simple via the YUM tool, as per these instructions, using a hand-crafted /etc/yum.conf like the one below. It was quite a task finding repositories with available FC1 packages, but I managed to use the following repos to good effect:


# Yum config file from http://www.xades.com/proj/fedora_repos.html
# Put this file at /etc/yum.conf

[main]
cachedir=/var/cache/yum
debuglevel=2
logfile=/var/log/yum.log
pkgpolicy=newest
distroverpkg=fedora-release
tolerant=1
exactarch=1

[base]
name=Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - Base
baseurl=ftp://ftp2.newnet.co.uk/pub/fedora/linux/core/$releasever/$basearch/os/

[DAG repo]
name = Fedora Core $releasever - $basearch - DAG repo
baseurl=http://apt.sw.be/fedora/$releasever/en/$basearch/dag/

[livna-stable]
name=Livna 3rd party packages with questionable (in USA) licenses -- use at your own risk
baseurl=http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/$releasever/$basearch/yum/stable


After a quick yum update as root, the main problems existed between RH9 packages that need libcom_err.so.3 (part of kr5-libs) and FC1 versions which don't. The DAG repo took care of packages like subversion and neon, but I was still left with a niggling postgres dependency.


package postgresql-libs needs libcom_err.so.3 (not provided)
package postgresql needs libcom_err.so.3 (not provided)
package postgresql-server needs libcom_err.so.3 (not provided)


I was also left with these little monkeys which were easily resolved by removing (rpm -e package_name) arts, redhat-config-securitylevel and all Mono packages left over from an install I never used.


conflict between xmms and arts
package redhat-config-securitylevel needs lokkit (not provided)
package mono-winforms needs mono(System.Web) >= 1.0.5000.0 (not provided)


So, I removed xmms. lokkit needs redhat-config-securitylevel which needs firstboot, so I just removed all these three as FC has no need for them anyway.

All went pretty smoothly after removing these troublesome packages, so now I have a working FC1 install from RH9! Now to upgrade to FC5 ;)