F17: Worst upgrade ever?

[joncr]

I managed to stick a fork in my F17 beta, so I installed fresh and clean. No problems at all. Other than the fact that my Nvidia card is one of those that in combination with nouveau and a 3.2/3.3 kernel paints the screen black. I chanted the appropriate kernel incantations and got on with it.

After tweaking font rendering to my tastes, F17 is looking very good here.

[markdk]

Originally Posted by gilboa

No need to reinstall (though I do agree that f16->f17 upgrade is indeed a mess.).

1. Reboot the machine, and press alt/space/esc just-before-fedora starts to bring up the grub menu.
2. Select the f16 entry and press 'e', it'll give you an option to edit the grub command line.
3. Search/replace f16 and replace it with f17 in all the lines.
4. Ctrl-X to reboot.
5. This should give you a working OS.
6. Assuming that the F17 is running OK, type the following (as root, use at your own risk):
$ rpm -qa | grep ^kernel | grep fc16 | sort
<list of f16 kernels)
7. Now either remove the fc16 kernel manually or go auto (use at your own risk, may eat babies)
$ yum remove $(rpm -qa | grep ^kernel | grep fc16)
8. Once done, rebuild the grub2 menu.
$ grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
9. Reboot (may give you file not found errors, but they won't prevent you from successfully booting into f17)

- Gilboa

Thank you for these instructions.
I could boot after running preupgrade, but not reboot :-(; and the boot menu entries were all f16 kernels.
I get a bit of hard drive hammering now and all the file not found stuff while it does that on poweron/reboot. But it does boot the f17 kernel now...
...more importantly for me it will now reboot. my issue was that after upgrading to f17 any shutdown/reboot caused a kernel panic, I guess because it had the f16 kernel until your instructions resolved that.
I agree, worst upgrade ever; I would think getting the correct kernel in place was a important part of an upgrade.
Thanks.

[ryptyde]

Upgraded using the DVD took about 1 1/2 hrs for it to finish and on reboot F16 kernel loaded instead of F17. Have yumex installed and ran that and had a bunch of updates and some threw errors and update process could not complete. Luckily with yumex you can select which packages to update and skip the offenders that are listed in the failed transaction.

First thing I should have done was see what kernel was installed besides the F16 ones, scrolled down the updates list and selected the F17 kernel bits and let yumex complete the transaction which was successful then rebooted and the new F17 kernel was listed in the grub menu as it wasn't listed after the initial upgrade process.

Ran yumex and completed most of the updates by selecting 5-10 at a time until the offenders with dependency issues were id'd and skipped until they get resolved. This was not the worst upgrade but not the best either, have had more difficulty running preupgrade in the past and have chosen to use the DVD to upgrade.

I would think that someone new to Fedora/Linux would be confused, disappointed and upset at first but it's rewarding when you get it sorted and realize it's not as bad as you first thought.

phil

[True Blue 61]

OK, so my previous comment was critical, if very understated. To balance it out, some kudos are in order; after several hours of work, my fc17 is working nicely. Good distro, very solid and snappy performance on this old hardware.

But good grief, you just can't let something go to production when it's that broken, and frankly, I'm way past the years when it was tolerable (if not actually fun) to spend hours fixing stuff that should just work. Users have many good choices today. Distros that put them through that kind of frustration shouldn't expect a second chance.

[gilboa]

Originally Posted by markdk

Thank you for these instructions.
I could boot after running preupgrade, but not reboot :-(; and the boot menu entries were all f16 kernels.
I get a bit of hard drive hammering now and all the file not found stuff while it does that on poweron/reboot. But it does boot the f17 kernel now...
...more importantly for me it will now reboot. my issue was that after upgrading to f17 any shutdown/reboot caused a kernel panic, I guess because it had the f16 kernel until your instructions resolved that.
I agree, worst upgrade ever; I would think getting the correct kernel in place was a important part of an upgrade.
Thanks.

Good to hear that it worked.
I don't necessarily agree that F17 was the worst upgrade ever, ever lived with RedHat Linux since 5.3 and Fedora since FC1, I had my share of broken installation / upgrades / etc.

... However, from a mere statistical POV, F17 had the lowest successful-first-boot rate in any Fedora release I ever used (Thus far, only 1/9 machines didn't require manual intervention to successfully boot.)

On the upside, once I fixed the grub / anaconda / etc issues, Fedora 17 seems to be working just fine.

- Gilboa

[StephenH]

AFAIAK, this has been an unmitigated disaster. I have an Acer Aspire One D250 that I cannot get F17 successfully installed upon. I took out a working SSD from my other machine and put it in this one (upgrade to different SSD for the other machine). I can't get Fedora 17 to install. It keeps dropping me to the dracut prompt.

Where's the beef? Right now, I consider it a miracle that my other two machines made it through preupgrade with relatively minor, relatively easily fixable problems. However, this one has me stymied.

[Penguinclaw]

Originally Posted by JohnTaylor1887

The problem lies in "upgrading" via overwriting existing files. I keep the same /home and just delete all config files except .mozilla and .thunderbird and just format /(root) doing a clean install. It took me all of 7 min to install F17 from usb flash drive. Why people insist on "upgrading" is beyond me, when most of the time it presents problems.

Using my method, I keep my /home and can install any distro no problems. But hey, what do I know, it only works everytime.

+1 from me, that is my method of choice which I've used for years. Upgrades in my opinion rarely seem to be 100% effective.

Mind having said that I have had issues with Pulseaudio causing Amarok and Rhythmbox to both randomly stop and it refused to recognize my usb Fiio headphone soundcard. Despite much head scratching and hair pulling I ended up removing Pulseaudio and now sound works a treat. This is a step backwards from F16 for me but otherwise everything else works as it should.

Also there was a slight hick-up with (I now can't remember which) an upgrade failing but with a work-around of uninstalling the culprit holding up the upgrades and re-installing when it was updated to "play game" fixed this minor issue.

So for me a hearty congratulations to the Fedora developer team

[RupertPupkin]

I'm liking F17 now.

I got everything back to normal that was working in F16, and in fact some GNUstep stuff that wouldn't compile in F16 does compile in F17. And now that I got JDEE working with Emacs 24, I'm even happier. I'm surprised that the upgrade to Emacs 24 in F17 hasn't been mentioned more in the forums. The stable version is still 23.4, and there were enough changes in 24.0 (which is still a developmental version) that some old stuff will probably break.

Today I even did a network install of F17 on an old laptop with 512MB memory using my main machine as a PXE installation server (following the instructions here). It worked perfectly. Looks like less than 512MB memory probably isn't enough for PXE installs, though (I tried it on another laptop with just 256MB memory and it conked out trying to load the LiveOS/squashfs.img file from the boot server). Still, it's good that for most machines PXE installs work this well in F17.

For clean installs of F17 I've had 100% success so far. It's just DVD upgrades to F17 that have been a problem for me. Telling people "just do a clean install" isn't going to cut it; the upgrade for F18 needs to be better.

[Penguinclaw]

My suggestion of clean install is my method of upgrade and for me it works beatifully. Of course I can understand those with many pc's to upgrade then this may not be practible and you're right ideally this should work with no problems. But I think overall F17 is a winner and worthy of success

[StephenH]

Well, I'm feeling a little less bad about F17. I burned an ISO of F17 LXDE spin to a CD and it installed without issue to an old Compaq Athlon system. However, on my wife's Acer Aspire One D250, I had to give up and revert back to the HDD that I had removed (which, fortunately, still had a working F17 install on it) since it is apparently the hardware that was causing the biggest issues. The AOD250 simply did not like the OCZ Vertex Plus SSD drive.

That actually worked out well. I was putting together a barebone system (Foxconn SFF R50-A1 AMD E-350 APU 1.6GHz/AMD A45/A&V&GbE PC Barebone System) purchased on Amazon for $104.00. This is an excellent little system. RAM, drives, keyboard mouse, and webcam must be added. Once done, it is a nice little system that does not take up much space. I got it to take to my parents since their laptop died. This one should make it possible for us to use skype again to talk with them. However, since I won't be there to help troubleshoot, this one got Mint 13 Maya, which is an LTS build. It should provide them excellent service.

[screamin_jesus]

F17 has been the most polished, issue free fedora release I've ever used, but I did a clean install.

[gilboa]

Indeed, once working, F17 is one of the best Fedora releases.
Problem is, getting there (pre-upgrade, clean install when sharing boot w/ F16, etc) is, err, chalanging

- Gilboa

[DaFoot]

I ended up doing a clean install, since then it's been much better behaved. My machine had been through probably 4 or 5 upgrades without a format so not bad that only 1 had significant issues.

[hvniekerk]

1 machine upgraded fine using pre-upgrade (with the shutdown issue resolved after another update) but the other machine now has its grub messed up. It won't show "Upgrade to F17", won't get rid of the latest kernel which I uninstalled. Then I reinstalled the latest kernel, rebooted and it won't boot from it.
So by lack of time, I'll download the dvd and either upgrade or do a clean one.

[BBQdave]

Originally Posted by screamin_jesus

F17 has been the most polished, issue free fedora release I've ever used, but I did a clean install.

Wow, depends on which end of the bar you are sitting

F16 (64-bit) was running smoothly for me on a Toshiba Satellite C655, that is until the release of F17 and F16 updates which broke my wireless. Was finally able to get F17, with updated kernel linux 3.4.0 and network manager updates, to work - but it is buggy. The latest from F17, was the frowning computer saying oh no something has gone wrong and then no desktop. I would have to log out and back in to get desktop.

With that, I am on Linux Mint 13 (64-bit) MATE. So far stable, and I am digging the desktop - you can actually populate it with files and folders and stuff