Spoke too soon

OK the machine in question to be upgraded from RH9 to FC was getting far too many segfaults for my liking, so I downloaded the first FC5 iso and booted up memtest86. Turns out one of the 512MB sticks is TOTALLY screwed. I left the tester for about 4 minutes, and it found cumulatively 67000 errors, approximately. Took the stick out, but by this time, I had already nuked the root directory so it's back to the start I go.

So, after much swearing, I tried the FC5 netinstall from CD 1. Needless to say, what should have been an easy job turned out to be a day long nightmare. Trying to grab headers and packages from CD1 and a nice quick Swedish FC repo proved to be too much for the box and just hung each time it got to "Starting installation...". I Alt+F'ed to the debug terminals to find db4 errors with the rpm DB. I nuked the /var/lib/rpm/__db.001 .002 and .003 files and moved the Packages file - the errors went, but the hangs didn't go away.

I gave up.

I'm getting the FC5 DVD iso as we speak. Fucking thing.

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 ;)