Date: September 28, 2012
Introduction
Fedora 18 alpha is just being released, so it is about time I upgrade
my home system to Fedora 17. I have a DVD of Fedora 17 for x86_64
(this system is a dual core 64 bit Athlon), and I am going to try doing
the upgrade from DVD.
Upgrade from DVD fails
I ultimately gave up on this and did a fresh install, here is the ugly
story of how things went attempting the upgrade.
- Upgrade failed due to ssh-server package issue of some kind.
- I verified the media on the target machine, checked OK.
- Upgrade failed because "rpmdb changed underneath us".
- Upgrade jumped to post-upgrade, but reboot dumped me into
Dracut shell, claiming the UUID for some partition did not exist.
Fresh Install
I have a strict policy of keeping myself in a position where it is
always relatively painless to do a full fresh install whenever a new
version of Fedora comes out. Some of my guidelines are:
- My root partition is about 20G in size (on my 500G hard drive) and
the only thing that goes in there are fedora system files.
(After finishing this F17 install, it is about 33 percent full, so 20G is
plenty, 10G would do, but I like 20G better).
- My user files go into a /u1 partition, /home (in the root partition)
contains only symlinks to /u1.
- Before the upgrade I make a tarball of /etc and put it into /u1.
It also is not a bad idea to make a tarball of /var (to catch things like
cron files, mail directories, and if you are foolish enough to leave them
there, your mysql database files.).
I keep a /boot partition as well as a root. I select "custom layout" and
be sure I can recognize my partitions before I start the install process.
I edit the /boot and root entries to tell the installer the mount points,
as well as that it should reformat these (great way to shoot yourself in
the foot if you screw up here). I customize packages and select xfce, and
most important of all deselect gnome!. Then all told the whole
install process took less than an hour.
Fixing my weird mouse and video problem
For a long time this system has had an odd problem where when I move the mouse
to the left hand side of the screen, the mouse pointer jumps to the top left.
This has been a real pain when I want to cut and paste text.
I was hoping that when I upgraded from F16 to F17 this would go away, but even
the installer exhibited the behavior. I tried changing mice, but that did no good.
I have an Nvidia GT520 card, and had a growing suspicion that it might be a bug in
the nouveau driver. So I planned after the upgrade to switch to the Nvidia vendor
driver (which still might be a good idea). After the upgrade, the problem was still
there, but once I installed all the updates, voila! The problem was gone.
So apparently the nouveau bug got found and fixed.
Smooth sailing
No weird problems to sort out. A little hand editing to get /u1 mounted and to
set up my user account (restoring links from /home). Yum install thunderbird,
ruby, and a few other things. Now my session goes automatically into xfce,
which is nice.
Have any comments? Questions?
Drop me a line!
Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org