May 4, 2023

Fedora 38 -- upgrade via DNF

Fedora 38 has been out for a week or two now, so I am going to upgrade my home system from Fedora 37 to 38. First I am going to reboot, as I am not running the latest kernel. Then the following. I am starting at 11:31 AM 
su
dnf update
dnf upgrade --refresh
Ultimately nothing to do, but I see:
Copr repo for kicad owned by @kicad
Copr repo for grass78 owned by neteler
I may want to clean up these two repo. I no longer have any interest in "grass78" and would probably rather be getting KiCAD from the regular Fedora packages. So I do the download: 
dnf -y system-upgrade download --refresh --releasever=38
We hit our first issue: 
 Problem: problem with installed package pipewire-jack-audio-connection-kit-0.3.70-1.fc37.x86_64
  - package pipewire-jack-audio-connection-kit-0.3.67-1.fc38.x86_64 conflicts with jack-audio-connection-kit provided by jack-audio-connection-kit-1.9.22-1.fc38.x86_64
  - package pipewire-jack-audio-connection-kit-0.3.70-1.fc38.x86_64 conflicts with jack-audio-connection-kit provided by jack-audio-connection-kit-1.9.22-1.fc38.x86_64
  - problem with installed package jack-audio-connection-kit-example-clients-1.9.21-3.fc37.x86_64
  - pipewire-jack-audio-connection-kit-0.3.70-1.fc37.x86_64 does not belong to a distupgrade repository
  - jack-audio-connection-kit-example-clients-1.9.21-3.fc37.x86_64 does not belong to a distupgrade repository
(try to add '--allowerasing' to command line to replace conflicting packages or '--skip-broken' to skip uninstallable packages)
I do this: 
dnf erase jack-audio-connection-kit-example-clients
dnf -y system-upgrade download --refresh --releasever=38
And this does the trick, off it goes downloading 4598 packages.
It ends with the following message: 
At least 1221MB more space needed on the / filesystem.
This was an issue during another recent upgrade (to 36/37). I have my root filesystem on a 128G SSD and as Fedora grows more bloated this is becoming awkward. The last time I moved /opt to another filesystem and made it a link. I run the command: 
cd /
du -s -x *
I see 250M in /boot, but it looks like /var is the pig with almost 17G. Perhaps the biggest thing is /var/cache/dnf, so I try: 
cd /var/cache/dnf
rm -rf *
dnf -y system-upgrade download --refresh --releasever=38
We are playing somewhat fast and loose with dnf by doing this, but we will see how lucky we are. It skips all the rpm downloads (recognizing they are already downloaded). After chewing on things for a long time, it declares everything OK and good to go. We start the next step at 12:18. 
dnf system-upgrade reboot
You can type escape to see actual system messages in lieu if the cute graphical progress screen.

At 12:50 it reboots into Fedora 38 -- so the whole thing took just under 1.5 hours.

What about those Copr packages?

COPR stands for "Cool Other Package Repo"

Apparently "Copr" is a fedora scheme for providing packages that don't "fit" into their usual package scheme. When I type "dnf update" it tells me about these "copr" repositories. I see that "grass" is now available as a regular Fedora package. But I have lost interest in it, so I do: 

su
dnf erase grass
cd /etc/yum.repos.d
rm _copr\:copr.fedorainfracloud.org\:neteler\:grass78.repo
After this I do: 
dnf clean metadata
dnf update
And there is no mention of the grass78 copr repo.

So I do the same for kicad and see the following: 

dnf erase kicat
Removing:
 kicad                                x86_64                    1:7.0.2-1.fc38
	@copr:copr.fedorainfracloud.org:group_kicad:kicad
rm _copr\:copr.fedorainfracloud.org\:group_kicad\:kicad.repo
dnf install kicad
Note that this did remove the kicad from copr. The reinstall gets it from the regular Fedora package set.

KiCAD is still horribly slow, but that is an issue for another page.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / [email protected]