| Mark Schreiber 2005-06-19, 8:48 pm |
| I've just finished upgrading from Fedora Core 3 to Fedora Core 4 via yum,
and thought that I should include a bit of information for anyone running
into problems similar to those I hit.
The package dependencies prohibit having FC3 and FC4 kernels installed at
the same time (FC3's kernel-utils package was apparently broken up into
FC4 packages like hardlink) -- I couldn't install FC4 packages and the
kernel, reboot with FC3's kernel still installed to test things, and then
uninstall the FC3 kernels if things didn't work.
So I blew away the FC3 kernels in favor of the FC4 ones and rebooted.
Sure enough, the system didn't boot. The kernel said something about
/sbin/udevstart exiting unexpectedly, and promptly gave up on booting.
I was able to get things working by rebooting with a FC3 Rescue CD,
"chroot"ing to /mnt/sysmount, "mv"ing
/boot/initrd-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4smp.img to
/boot/initrd-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4smp.img-bak, and running
$ mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.6.11-1.1369_FC4smp.img 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4smp
The next reboot, things worked. The initrd I generated was significantly
larger than the previous one there -- 1.2 MB compared to 527 KB.
In addition, I have a reiserfs root filesystem -- apparently, FC4 uses
SELinux, and SELinux and ReiserFS may not get along (at least they did not
at some point in the past). I added the kernel options reiserfs selinux=0
to grub.conf. This disables SELinux -- nice as SELinux may be, it takes a
back seat to mounting my root filesystem. I am not certain if this was
actually necessary. I had seen a post that it was necessary for one of
the FC4 test releases.
While yum ad-hoc upgrades may not be a supported path, the fact that they
generally *do* work pretty cleanly is a testament to the accuracy of the
package dependency information included by the folks at Red Hat -- thanks,
guys and girls.
For anyone currently upgrading to FC4, be aware that at the time of this
post, a number of third-party RPM repositories do not yet have FC4 builds
out yet -- you may want to hold off on upgrading until all your favorite
packages are available for FC4 (though almost all FC3 packages seem to
work fine under FC4). Specifically, check Livna, Dries, NewRPMs, ATRPMs,
and the Macromedia Flash repository, if you rely on them.
One other tidbit I noticed in the FC4 release notes -- FC5 will NOT have
LinuxThreads support, and is incompatible with any NPTL-compiled binaries.
This means that a number of binary-only old games from the relatively
Linux-game-rich Loki era (like the excellent Jagged Alliance 2) will
permanently cease working quite soon. Owners should get their remaining
playtime in on FC4 while they can.
(Or play the Windows versions with WINE; the Windows binary format seems
to be a more forward-compatible format to ship binary-only applications in
than any existing Linux formats, with the possible exceptions of Java
bytecode and formats for similar VMs that can run on Linux.)
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