November 1, 2024

Fedora 41 -- upgrade via DNF

It is November 1, 2024 and Fedora 41 is available.

My home system (trona) is running on an old kernel. It has been up for 46 days, so the first thing to do is to boot to the latest kernel. 

su
dnf update
reboot
Once the smoke clears from the reboot, we do the following. I find it advantageous to edit this page, then cut and paste the commands from here to avoid typos. 
su
dnf upgrade --refresh
-- this, as usual, does nothing
dnf -y system-upgrade download --refresh --releasever=41
This installs 83 packages and upgrades 3259. It takes 15-20 minutes to download them. At the end of the download it runs the transaction check. This takes a while, but finds no problems.

I'll remark again that I did a fresh reinstall of f39 and set up a much bigger root partition, so I expect life to be nicer now. Indeed, when I run "df" at the end of the download process, I see only 7 percent in use. 

dnf system-upgrade reboot
Type escape to see actual system messages in lieu of the cute graphical progress screen. This takes about 30 minutes and ends by booting up in the new system.

Nvidia driver

I had trouble with this back when I upgraded to F40. The issue was akmod-nvidia, and the symptoms were terrible graphics performance and a very slow mouse. This all seems fine this time. If this pops up again, see my notes for F40.

Problems

I try to ssh to my system at the university and get: 
/home/tom/.ssh/config line 6: Bad key types '+ssh-rsa,ssh-dss'.
/home/tom/.ssh/config line 7: Bad key types '+ssh-rsa,ssh-dss'.
/home/tom/.ssh/config line 11: Bad key types '+ssh-rsa,ssh-dss'.
/home/tom/.ssh/config line 12: Bad key types '+ssh-rsa,ssh-dss'.
/home/tom/.ssh/config: terminating, 4 bad configuration options
The "fix" is to rename the config file to config.OLD and postpone dealing with this. I have (or had) special settings here to deal with old embedded systems where I have no way of updating the ssh server. The ssh "crew" keeps doing this (getting rid of old insecure key types) thinking that it somehow makes the world a better place. I'll have to find a way to crowbar this situation. Maybe build some special ssh client of my own and keep it under a different name. An unnecessary pain in the ass.

This fix caused another problem -- now my connections time out. I need to keep the following line in config: 

ServerAliveInterval 600
Note that this is done on the client side, and has always worked fine. There are probably ways to also deal with this on the server side, but I have never done any of that (nor meeded to)
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / [email protected]