F7 to F9 preupgrade -- What I had to do

alake · #1 23rd May 2008, 01:36 PM

I have successfully upgraded my Fedora 7 x86_64 to Fedora 9. But it wasn't a completely smooth operation. In the hope that my experience will help someone else, I'm going to list what I did.

Back up hard drive. My hard drive is configured as LVM. I did a
Code:
```
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
```
where sda is my internal hard drive and sdb is my USB hard drive. I found that I could reverse that procedure to restore sda, but I couldn't do anything else. I reinitialized sdb and used rsync to copy the directories that I wanted from sda to sdb. I didn't need the backup.
Code:
```
yum install preupgrade
```
Code:
```
preupgrade
```
This operation went quite smoothly.
Post install work:
1. Run
  Code:
```
sensors-detect
```
2. Menu option: System | Administration | Services. Disable LISa. It would be cleaner to delete the reference to it in the /etc directory, but I can't think of the name of it right now.
3. The install thought that my monitor called for a 1360x768 display resolution, which caused my proportions to be "off". I opened the Display Settings at System | Administration | Display and reset the resolution to 1024x768. I then rebooted to get out of X and start it again.
4. I have two ethernet ports, but am using only eth0. I opened the Network Configuration with System | Administration | Network. My eth0 was inactive following the upgrade and I was unable to activate it. I selected it with the Devices tab and pressed the Edit button. I checked the first four items, then saved and closed the Network Configuration. I opened System | Administration | Services again and restarted Network. That got me on-line.
5. Because my computer is in my house, I don't need the level of security that an office computer needs. Under F7, I set the system to automatically log me in when I boot the machine. F9 doesn't give me that capability. One commentator on this forum said that people like me wanted to give Linux a bum rap of being insecure and that I shouldn't have the automatic login option. I don't think that he and his ilk should be making my decisions for me.
6. The final step was to do a
  Code:
```
yum update
```
  . The update did not want to complete because there were conflicts with some Fedora 7 i386 packages that were left on the system. I used
  Code:
```
rpm -e <package>
```
  using the entire package name to remove the offending packages. Only one failed because it had dependencies. That was the F7 i386 kdepim package. I had to use PackageKit to remove it and the many packages that depended upon it. I took a big chance removing all those packages but I use Gnome, not KDE. (I'd suggest that KDE users switch to Gnome just for this operation.) I then reinstalled kdepim. It had only one package dependent upon it. I was then able to run the
  Code:
```
yum update
```
  . Note that the packages were downloaded to cache before I deleted kdepim, so I think that the update restored everything.

My system is now running with Fedora 9. I do expect to find other things that don't work. One that I found after all of this is the Flash plugin. With Firefox 3, there doesn't appear to be a 32 bit version. In the past I haven't gotten Gnash to work. Some sites check to see whether you have Flash installed and won't show the video if you aren't using it. It will take some more experimentation to see if I can get it to work.

I had hoped that preupgrade would enable non-techies to use Fedora on the desktop. I guess we're not there yet.

cavin1 · #2 26th May 2008, 02:21 AM

Alake,
one word - magnificent, you've saved my life, I ws aving major problkems installing FC 9, read your post and re-installed FC 8, then applied your medhod exactly and perfectomatically or something like that !!! I'm up and running with FC 9.
a BIG thank you !!!!! Des Cavin..................