How-To Upgrade Guide: Upgrade your FC4 or FC5 Server to FC6

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Current Revision Date: Friday, December 29, 2006

For a few years now, I have successfully been running a home server that started with Fedora Core 4 (Stenze 2005), which resides behind a small firewall (d-link 514 b router).

Reading many snippets of how-to’s, from various websites, not only got me confused; but I got ticked off a lot when I was almost done setting up the box… it didn’t work. This How-To, will (hopefully) guide you on upgrading your FC4 or FC5 to FC6

Time Required: (depending on the hardware) 1.5 hours or less..
Our Wanted OS: Fedora Core 6
Our Updater: YUM
What You Need: Patience, pot of coffee, Fedora Core 4 or 5 on old working hardware, working Internet connection on a LAN…

Update FC4 to FC5
OK - I'm at the point where I have a machine that has been using FC4 on it that I want to upgrade to FC5 or better yet FC6. I can’t afford to blow the OS away and start over, all my application installs and settings, databases and configurations would be lost. I have NO CDr’s left or DVDr’s to burn the ISO’s. Before I began, I google’d "yum upgrade FC4 to FC5" and saw a number of links to people who have tried this and had MANY MANY problems - as did I - so I discovered. So to hopefully save you the trouble I went through, I recorded the errors and whipped up this guide.

Upgrade Step 1 – First I needed to get all the latest FC4 updates including the latest kernel using YUM. We will run some commands, clean the YUM cache and perform some updates

• yum –y update

IF you have FEDORAFAQ installed; a conflict with yum-fedorafaq may come up, so remove this package.
• yum -y remove yum-fedorafaq

Then I cleaned YUM's cache
• yum clean all

Next, based on advice found in a couple of links, I removed all the extra kernels from the system to prevent kernel overload. (It’s safe) Query the current kernel(s) if any extras are present.

• rpm -q kernel

Then for each kernel other than the latest I ran the command to remove them

• yum -y erase kernel-xxx-xxx-xx

Then I installed the FC5 release RPM from the fedora website
(link may have changed at time of writing) PS - Theres a SPACE in the HTTP to avoid the URL tage in posting

• rpm -Uhv http ://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/5/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/fedora-release-5-5.noarch.rpm

Then I updated the YUM tool as the new one is much faster

• yum -y update yum

Then I ran a kernel update which will drive much of the rest of the software to update. ** NOTE- The following errors are ones I encountered and MAY not be present to you. Dependency errors vary and you will have to satisfy them by installing OR removing applications to satisfy the kernel update request.

• yum update kernel

This produced a number of dependencies that had to be fixed. So as YUM listed the deps, I recorded the applications and removed them. IF I needed them later on, I would just yum them back on.

• yum remove pcmcia-cs
• yum remove sane-backends
• yum remove linuxwacom
• yum remove xorg-x11
• yum remove ImageMagick
• yum remove synaptics
• yum remove xorg-x11-xfs

I then re-ran the kernel update command to see what removing these items had fixed and what else was left as far as deps go. Sure enough, more errors!

• yum update kernel

Error: Missing Dependency: hotplug is needed by package udev
Error: Missing Dependency: hotplug >= 2001_04_24-13 is needed by package gphoto2
Error: Missing Dependency: libssl.so.5 is needed by package iiimf-libs
Error: Missing Dependency: howl = 0.9.8 is needed by package howl-libs
Error: Missing Dependency: iiimf-libs = 1:12.2-4.fc4.2 is needed by package iiimf-libs-devel
Error: Missing Dependency: xorg-x11-libs = 6.8.2-37.FC4.49.2.1 is needed by package xorg-x11-devel
Error: Missing Dependency: XFree86-libs >= 4.2.99 is needed by package libgnomeui
Error: Missing Dependency: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XKeysymDB is needed by package openmotif

Removing udev is pretty much a non-starter - the system would not run and you would be out of a server - so let's nibble around the edges and remove dependency errors and try to find why hotplug is needed.

• yum provides hotplug

And here is why : pam_usb-hotplug.i386
You can try installing it with YUM but the errors still show up, so let's remove as much as we can that doesn't actually break the system.

• yum remove iiimf-libs iiimf-libs-devel howl-libs xorg-x11-devel libgnomeui openmotif

And now install hotplug to satisfy the deps noted

• yum install pam_usb-hotplug.i386

Lots of things get updated - but it runs to completion!!! Now let's see if the update to the kernel will run now that we have satisfied all the errors and deps reported.

• yum update kernel

Again, we struggle with errors listed below. DON’T DISPAIR, grab a cuppa’ java and keep going…It WILL WORK!

Error: Missing Dependency: hotplug >= 2001_04_24-13 is needed by package gphoto2
Error: Missing Dependency: hotplug is needed by package udev

SIGH… - so remove gphoto2

• yum remove gphoto2

Re-Run the kernel update command again…

• yum update kernel

Hey! This time it worked! NO ERRORS - Now reboot the server “reboot –n” for the new kernel to be used.

** NOTE – IF you have dual NIC’s, the order the Ethernet Cards when the server came back up was in different order, so I had to log onto the console and change the network init stuff in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts to use eth1 instead of eth0 - minor but interesting.

Now let's do a full FC4 update and see what happens. ** NOTE – my packages are different so you may have more or less to update.

• yum –y update

Transaction Summary
Install 42 Package(s)
Update 507 Package(s)
Remove 0 Package(s)

Hey! That's it - done! OK - I have to put some packages back in - ImageMagick and gimp for example - but that's fairly minor and easy. You should now have an updated FC5 Server with all of your settings in tact. Test drive all your apps and with any luck, your server is now current.

Upgrade FC5 to FC6 – Now that Fedora Core 6 is available it is time to upgrade those old crusty FC5 installs. To upgrade from FC5 you can follow these steps:

You may be able to skip this step but I did a YUM UPDATE on FC5 first to make sure everything there was up to date and worked before moving to FC6. Since we just did them with the guide above; we can now go to our next adventure of upgrading FC5 to FC6. Its actually easier and faster then FC4 to FC5.

• Do a "yum clean all" to remove all the old FC5 YUM information.
• Install the fedora-release for Fedora Core 6 using the following rpm command:
PS - Theres a SPACE in the HTTP to avoid the URL tage in posting ** NOTE – you need to add BOTH URLs on the same command

rpm -Uhv http ://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/fedora-release-6-4.noarch.rpm http ://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/fedora-release-notes-6-3.noarch.rpm

• Run the yum update: yum -y update.

I didn’t have to remove any packages to get past dependency issues, however; IF YOU DO… remove them, and then just added them back after the update.

VOILA! Our server has been given an extreme makeover from FC4 to FC6, verify your settings and applications and walk away.. GOOD JOB!