Fedora 13 yum upgrade notes

It is late June of 2010 and Fedora 13 has been out for a while. We have our local mirror all loaded up, so I am ready to upgrade my system (an x86_64 system running an up to date Fedora 12 install). As usual, my plan is to do the upgrade via yum, and follow my yum upgrade notes for Fedora 12 as a guide.

Although I have been warned that if I do the update under X, I can expect X to hang when it updates the bitmap-fonts-compat package, I go ahead and do the update under X anway, as I always have done. I experienced no troubles or hangs at all.

Backup vital things

As always, I do a backup of vital files: 
cd /root
mkdir -p f12-f13
cd  f12-f13
# gather info for potential recovery later
tar -C / -czf etc.tgz etc
rpm -qa --qf '%{NAME}-%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE}.%{ARCH}\n' | sort > rpm.ls.f13
chkconfig --list > chkconfig.ls.f13
ifconfig > ifconfig
route -n > route-n
df -h > df-h
cp -p /boot/grub/grub.conf grub.conf.f13

Switch repositories and do the upgrade

I copy all the old .repo files (for F12) into /etc/yum.repos.d/F12 as I have always done (though this has never proven to be useful).

Then I pull in the fedora-release rpm (fedora-release-13-1.noarch.rpm) using the following commands: 

yum clean all
rpm -Uhv http://mmt/fedora/releases/13/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-13-1.noarch.rpm
After this, I double check that the entries in yum.repos.d still point to our mirror (they do). Just in case rpm and/or yum have been upgraded, I do this first: 
yum update rpm\* yum\*

This doesn't find anything to pull in, and when I got for broke with yum -y update it claims there are no packages to update either. Apparently I must do the yum clean all again after switching repositories as follows: 

yum clean all
yum -y update
This looks promising at first, but trips over a dependency (see below), giving me a chance to try the rpm and yum update once again after doing yum clean all. to pull in updated copies of rpm and yum. This does pull in new versions of yum and rpm (and over 200 other dependent packages, including perl, ruby, and openoffice!).

Straighten out package dependencies

This always requires some manual fussing of the "rinse - lather - repeat" style. The first complaint is the following: 
Transaction Check Error:
  file /usr/share/gettext/libintl.jar from install of gettext-libs-0.17-16.2.fc13.x86_64 conflicts with file from package gettext-0.17-16.fc12.i686
What I do is to yum erase the offending packages, making a note to yum install them again once the big update is finished. In this case: 
yum erase gettext gettext-libs
yum -y update
This does the trick and the update takes off installing 65 new packages and updating 1636 (including gettext and gettext-libs). Doing the update over a 100 Mbit LAN from a fast local server takes a bit under 2 hours. When it is done, I reinstall the one package that gettext took away, namely xfce4-dev-tools and it now pulls in gettext-devel, this change is probably what caused my dependency problem.

reboot

This was entirely uneventful and I am up and running Fedora 13, only 3-4 hours after starting the upgrade process. This was one of my smoothest fedora upgrades ever, unless there are alligators hiding and waiting to bite me. The only thing I have seen thus far is that the new firefox I am now running wants me to find a newer and better flash plugin.
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / [email protected]