March 15, 2022

Fedora 35 -- upgrade via DNF

I will first upgrade my home system from F34 to F35.

I start this about 9:00 PM
The download was complete and good to go by 9:32 PM.
By 10:18 PM I was running F35 and typing this. It was a completely smooth and clean upgrade with no issues.

First I boot to the latest kernel (I was at least 3 kernels behind when I decided to do the upgrade). 
su
dnf update
reboot
After that, I do: 
su
dnf upgrade --refresh   (yields: nothing to do)
dnf -y system-upgrade download --refresh --releasever=35
It has 4247 packages to do, 114 to install 4132 to upgrade.
All of this took about 1/2 hour and now the thing to do is: 
dnf system-upgrade reboot
This reboots to a single user non-graphical console to install packages. Doing so takes about 3/4 of an hour.

After a total elapsed time of about 1.3 hours I am running Fedora 35 on my home system.

Now for my work system

This machine has been running for 137 days and needs to be booted to the latest kernel before the uptrade.

This does not have an SSD so it may take longer than my home system. Being on a faster network compensates for the slower disk, and the download certainly goes faster.

I use the exact same simple process as above, but I do it remotely. It has 3283 packages to download.

After only 10 minutes it is back online, but back to running F34. Clearly something went wrong. Looking at good old /var/log/messages has information, and I see: 

Problem opening package adapta-backgrounds-0.5.3.1-11.fc35.noarch.rpm
Error: GPG check FAILED
It is certainly nice that it has reverted to F34, but I have no idea why it is having trouble with GPG keys. I have no idea what this package is, and I don't have it on my home system, so ....

I dnf erase "adapta-backgrounds", which gets rid of the F34 file.
I rm the F35 RPM which is in /var/lib/dnf/system-upgrade/fedora-37*/packages
Then I redo the download, which skips all the packages, declaring them already downloaded.
I launch the "upgrade reboot" and go to bed.

In the morning, the machine is not online and clearly something has gone wrong that will require my attention.

When I get there, the machine is asking for a password to go into emergency mode. I use journalctl to look at the logs and discover that there are fsck errors on sda2. I run fsck /dev/sda2, answer "y" to a bunch of questions, then get the hint that I can answer "a" to tell it "yes for everything else that comes up".

When this finishes, I type Ctrl-D and it continues with the normal bootup and in a couple of minutes I am running F35. I reboot the machine to ensure that it can boot up without issue and call it good.

And now the mirror lab machines

These each go smoothly and each takes only 20 minutes total! That is what a modern machine with an M.2 solid state disk does for you.
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / [email protected]