F15: Upgrade from Fedora 14 to 15 on a home-built Linux Desktop 1

I simply used preupgrade, as in §6.3.10. Here I log only differences relative to the same upgrade on machine 2, logged in §6.3.9.

I had one big issue which was not enough space in /boot/ (only 190 MB). It was so bad that I had to delete all prior kernels for the upgrade to proceed, leaving only the upgrade-to-F15 boot files. This looked safe to me because the upgrade-boot tells you exactly how much more space it needs in /boot/. However, to my great surprise, the upgrade made no entry in /boot/grub/grub.conf for the new F15 kernel. The grub shell could not list /boot, so I could not tell if the F15 kernel was even there, or what its name was. The upgrade did not complete in other respects as well (see below).

I booted up an old Helix rescue disk (where are all my old Fedora rescue disks???), but unfortunately it could only mount boot partitions and not logical drives, so I could only see my three boot partitions. My latest old one was for F8! I saved the F14 grub.conf, copied over the F8 grub.conf, copied its first choice of kernel boot files, and rebooted into F8. It spontaneously came up in single-user mode with all filesystems mounted -- Hooray! From there I could copy my saved last F14 kernel files (from /etc/LastFedora14-kernel/ -- glad I made that copy!) to /boot/, and restored my F14 grub.conf. I could have added the choice of F15 kernel at that point, since I could now see its boot files, but I worried that, if the upgrade did not give me that choice yet, it probably had more to using another F14 boot. However, when I rebooted into F14, nothing further seemed to happen. It just looked like F15 with an F14 kernel running. I made the final changes to grub.conf, rebooted, and here I am, seemingly whole (but only partially upgraded -- see below).

In summary, there appears to be an F15 upgrade bug such that grub.conf is not updated to offer a default F15 kernel selection.

A moral of the story is, for now,

Do not delete all prior kernels to make room for an upgrade!

Next time I will do a fresh install and give at least a GIGABYTE to the /boot/ partition, or maybe ten gigabytes! It would be nice to move this system from 32 to 64 bits anyway, but I also like having both a 32- and 64-bit system for testing whether various issues are related to system wordlength (all my CPUs are 64 at this point).

Amazingly, after the F14 upgrade, I had no .rpmsave files and only one .rpmnew file (to /etc/inittab with a file of only comments directing attention to systemd).

``Problems'' (evidently the upgrade to F15 did not complete):

There were quite a few items listed by package-cleanup -problems and package-cleanup -orphans. Below is my log:

# yum remove beagle ;; no f15 version yet
# yum list installed | grep kernel
# yum remove kernel-rt ;; several old ones lying around
# ;; temporarily removed planetccrma-core
# ;; This is taking too long - let's try a shortcut:
# yum distro-sync ;; WHOAH! WANTS TO GO TO F14!
# yum repolist ;; WHOAH! All repos are F14!
# yum --releasever=15 distro-sync ;; gpg failure!
# yum --nogpgcheck --releasever=15 distro-sync ;; to hell with it
# ;; See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading_Fedora_using_yum#Upgrading_Fedora_using_yum_directly
# ;; The Fedora upgrade stuff is definitely not ready for prime time

Many fc15 packages depend on some fc14 packages, so it's very hard to know what is old and should be deleted.a

Shortcuts

In System Settings / Keyboard / Shortcuts:

  Ctrl+Alt+E = emacs -geometry 80x50
  Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E = emacs -sclang -geometry 80x50 /sc/tests.sc
    [Bug: this shortcut overflows the textfield and the window
          cannot be resized to make it visible]
  Ctrl+Alt+C = google-chrome
  Ctrl+Alt+T = gnome-terminal [in Launchers]
  Ctrl+Alt+J = qjackctl

Things done after F15 upgrade:

#yum install libicu-devel ;; for SuperCollider build from source
#<make install latest SuperCollider git on 9/12/11>
#/sbin/ldconfig /usr/lib/libscsynth.so
>mv ~/share/SuperCollider/Extensions ~/.local/share/SuperCollider/
><install quarks autogui, crucial, dewdrop_lib,
#yum remove supercollider
;; => Removing: supercollider, supercollider-devel,
;;    supercollider-dewdrop, supercollider-emacs, supercollider-extras,
;;    supercollider-mathlib, supercollider-midifile
;; [going with latest git versions now]
#updatedb ;; where is Emacs sclang-mode.el* now?
;; Hacked .emacs load-library to find sclang stuff
;; While editing a shortcut for Emacs, system went nuts
#yum install lynx ;; systemd died - back to the console
#yum install alpine ;; see if anything got mailed to root - *sigh*
#yum reinstall systemd-units ;; get once to GUI each time this is done
;; selinux is relabeling the file system on each boot - very slow
;; From /var/log/messages, looks like my graphics card freaked out,
;;  causing the system to become unstable and evidently clobber itself
#yum install cwiid-devel} ;; SC latest git needs this now (11/2011)
#yum install gnome-tweak-tool} ;; Linus likes
#yum groupinstall Xfce -y ;; to try out XFCE window manager
  Add to XFCE Settings / Session and Startup / Application Autostart
    /usr/bin/setxkbmap -option "ctrl:nocaps"
;; For libmad install to work:
#rpm -Uvh  http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm   http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
Retrieving http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
#yum install libmad-devel ;; MPEG audio decoder for latest qtractor svn to configure and build
#svn co https://qtractor.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/qtractor/trunk qtractor-svn; cd qtractor-svn; make -f Makefile.svn; ./configure; make; make install
#yum install yum-updatesd ;; I thought I already had this previously!
  ;; then edit three 'no's to 'yes' in /etc/yum/yum-updatesd.conf 
#yum install aeolus 
#yum install libusb1-devel ;; for ardour 3.0 to build
#yum install aubio-devel ;; for ardour 3.0 to build
#yum install cppunit-devel ;; for ardour 3.0 to build
#yum install libgnomecanvasmm26-devel ;; for ardour 3.0 to build
#;; not found: lilv-0
#yum install scons ;; for sc-3.4 branch to build
#yum install octave-signal ;; don't know how this got lost - pulls in octave-optim
#yum install octave-doc ;; don't know how this got lost
;; ...