Upgrading an isolated Fedora 11 system to Fedora 14

By "isolated", I mean a system which is not on a high speed LAN. In particular, this is my home system, running Fedora 11, and with a decently fast DSL connection. I probably could update this system via the network, but much prefer to use install media.

I start the game by booting the Fedora 14 x86_64 DVD. I don't really expect this to work, and it doesn't. It tells me that it would be willing to upgrade from either of the previous 2 versions, but not from Fedora 11. I am told that I must sequentially update through all intermediate versions (but it hinted I could jump from 12 to 14, we will see about that.)

I have a Fedora 12 x86_64 DVD, so I boot that and tell it I want to upgrade. At some point it asks me if I want to update my boot loader, I tell it OK, and next thing I know it wants to set up the network to do something. I tell it to do DHCP, knowing that my DSL modem has some unresolved issue. I never found out just what happened (since I am not going to sit staring at my monitor for hours), but ultimately it pressed on with the update. Updating Grub via the network rather than from install media is stupid. The update takes about 3.5 hours and then I am ready to reboot.

Well, it won't boot cleanly. It flashes the screen sveral times after starting the Avahi daemon (lucky for me I already has disabled the graphical boot nonsense so I can see what is going on). My bet is that something is amiss with the X setup and or my graphics drivers (I was using the "nv" driver with a custom xorg.conf file). Tapping the power button does a clean shutdown, then I edit the bootline under grub to append the word "single" and boot up single user. I edit /etc/inittab, changing the run level from 5 to 3 (never a bad idea when doing an upgrade in any event), and reboot OK to a multiuser system without graphics, this is fine for now.

In goes the Fedora 14 DVD once more, and this time it is satisfied. It seems to take only a couple of hours to do the update, but when it comes time to do the reboot, it doesn't.

It is complaining about a bad superblock on /dev/sda1 and dropping me into single user maintenance mode. This partition used to be my /boot partition. I happened to notice that it now thinks that my root partition is on /dev/sde3, so my suspicion is that my SATA drives are now called sde instead of sda (and I am correct). I edit the /etc/fstab file, or try to, since this is a read only filesystem, I must first give the command: 

mount -o remount,rw /
After this, I edit fstab to change all sda to sde everywhere, reboot and away I go.

Fixing X graphics

I get all kinds of obscure complaints when I use xinit or startx to try to launch the X server. So I take the easy way out. I delete the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf altogether (well actually I just rename it). I happen to remember from work on another system, that if you do this, the "nouveau" driver (for Nvidia graphics cards) will get used by default and pretty much do the right thing (at least for a single head system like mine). This in fact works just fine, and will do for me until such time as I get a second monitor or some such. No telling what will happen if I decide to play with OpenGL, as I intend to do some day.

Update via yum

Now that I have a clean Fedora 14 install, I want to get the current crop of updates, so as root, I issue the yum update command. This has some 500 or so packages to update and ultimately takes about 1.5 hours on my DSL connection. I reboot to get the new kernel it has given me and things seem pretty good.

Cleaning up network problems

For some unknown reason, my system never gets it quite right when it does the DHCP thing with my DSL modem. I am connected via a 100 Mbit copper connection (via the on-board VIA chipset ethernet VT6102). It gets the IP number and DNS stuff, but never sets up a default route to my DSL modem. I keep having (after every reboot) to do by hand (as root): 
route add default gw 192.168.0.1
It turns out this is not hard at all to fix, and as I suspected is some relic of my previous static IP setup on this machine.
The file: 
/etc/sysconfig/network
sets the GATEWAY variable (to 10.0.0.1), which fails, but causes dynamic setup of the gateway route to be bypassed. Once I comment out this line, everything is fine.
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / [email protected]