Fedora 16 to 17 upgrade shenanigans

Fedora 16 to 17 Upgrade…nightmare.

I’m convinced that persons developing and using Linux on a daily basis insist that upgrading your Linux distro to the latest and greatest is supposed to be the easiest thing since wiping your own arse. In all frank and honesty, upgrading to Fedora 17 from 16 has been a royal pain in said arse.

I first attempted to perform the upgrade shortly after Fedora 17 went live. I received some random error message about gtk_init moaning about displays or some such bollocks and didn’t bother trying any further thinking they’d sort something out with F16 to help you through the upgrade. Well, they didn’t.

Running preupgrade on a runlevel 3 (non-GUI, you know, a server) will give you said error. What you’re supposed to do is execute preupgrade-cli. Why of course! I should have known! Did the dev forget to check the runlevel and offer a bit of advice instead of puking all over the screen? Guess not.

Then when you run preupgrade-cli, you do so by specifying the distro to upgrade to:

preupgrade-cli "Fedora 17 (Beefy Miracle)"

Then you’re moaned at for not having a large enough partition for some random file but told it will be all OK if you’re on a wired connection. Full speed ahead your system downloads all the packages and then, after saying its made a change to your grub config, you are safe to reboot. Now the system reboots…and promptly goes straight back in to F16. If your computer could look back at you in a nonplussed fashion, it would be doing.

So you have another go and spot the error that says sh grub file or folder not found. Eh? How is my PC even booting if grub isn’t there? It turns out that F16 apparently forced an upgrade to GRUB2 and it’s your GRUB2 config file that receives the updated “Upgrade to Beefy Miracle” boot entry. Useful! Except my computer was booting from GRUB. Don’t ask me why, I have no idea.

So I ensure GRUB2 is installed and on my boot partition:

grub2-install /dev/sda

I then decide it’s wise to ensure that my GRUB2 install has the latest info about my system (all the kernels I had in GRUB):

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

A reboot yields an actual option to perform the upgrade to Beefy Miracle so I select it and again my computer screen is puked on with various 404 errors. Yes, that’s right, the “second stage” URL that grubby spewed in to my grub.cfg at the end of preupgrade-cli was WRONG so I had to edit it and remove the /LiveOS\squashfs.img location MANUALLY by pressing “e” on the highlighted boot table entry when GRUB2 loaded.

Only after all this (which I admit involved a lot of reading/learning) did I manage to get to a point where it looked like Fedora 17 would install the packages it had spent an hour downloading. As I type this it’s still installing the F17 packages but I have no idea if it will actually work given how many upgrade cock-ups I’ve had to battle my way through so far. Someone at Fedora needs shooting.

– Lewis