[sclug] FYI: Upgrading FC10 to FC11 via yum

[Alex Butcher]

I bit the bullet last night and upgraded two systems from FC10 to FC11 using
'yum upgrade'. I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't too much trouble.
The problems I encountered were:

- Some packages' dependencies aren't quite right, so the easiest thing to do
   is to remove them before the upgrade, then put them back aftwards. The
   most glaring examples arte ntp and ntpdate as per
   <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=506040>/
   <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=504980>. Other problematic
   packages were non-core packages, like mplayer, Miro, streamdvd.

- Under FC10 on my x86_64 box, I had both i386 and x86_64 versions of some
   packages installed.  Some of these (gpm.i386, glibc.i386,
   wxGTK-devel.i386) caused problems for the upgrade process.  Fix as above,
   except the upgrade seemed to put them back.

- I use the deprecated InstantMirror, together with nightly rsyncing against
   rsync.mirrorservice.org to maintain a local fast mirror of the distro and
   its updates for both i386 and x86_64. I think mirrorservice might have
   been experiencing some problems, causing timeouts when grabbing the
   packages. Luckily, as yum defaults to retaining its package cache between
   runs, I was able to eventually build up a complete set of packages
   required by running 'yum upgrade' a few times.

- As expected, there were a few .rpmnew and .rpmsave copies of config files
   created. A careful sysadmin will manually examine them and keep the
   original, merge the changes or update to the new file as appropriate to
   their environment.

- gnome-power-manager crashes on startup on my laptop. Errata update coming
   RSN: <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=506084>

- There seems to be a bug in the SATA handling somewhere in the kernel,
   causing SMART queries to cause one of my discs to disconnect and reconnect
   repeatedly. This is exacerbated by DeviceKit's new-found SMART awareness
   <http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/DeviceKit>. I'll double-check my
   cabling, and hope it gets fixed, I guess.
   <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=485855>

The upgrade certainly wasn't the car crash I'd found when attempting to boot
from the install media and perform a distro upgrade that way. I'll use yum
again in future.

Best Regards,
Alex