Upgrading to FC5 with yum
 

Hi all,

Just upgraded my server over SSH from FC4 to FC5 and wanted to share a bit the experience. The upgrade itself went quite smooth once I got it to upgrade. Here are 2 things I learned the hard way:

1) Old kernels can be a b#tch! Before you begin, do the following:

This will return a list of what is installed on your system. E.g. I still had some old 2.6.9 & 2.6.10 kernels installed I completely forget about. A simple

did the trick. Be careful with the wildcards though, don't uninstall your current kernel ;-).

2) When you install the base noarch package for Fedora 5, it is so kind to not overwrite your existing repositories. This is a good thing but you need to make some modifications to them as well. I did two things: disable all custom repo's (dag, jpackage, etc...) & added my own fast mirrors to fedora-core.repo. It seems the fedora mirrorlist does not always select the fastest mirror near you ;-).

Also one minor glitch: it seemed that e2fsprogs had 2 older versions & 2 different branches installed (x64 & i386); removing the older one & the i386 one (I have an AMD Sempron) fixed the conflict.

If you have the yum-utils package installed from Extras you can also remove surplus kernels with a feature of the package-cleanup utility, which is very painless.

WRT mirrors, you may like this:

http://wiki.linux.duke.edu/YumPlugins

The version of yum in FC5 supports plugins, and that page has a link to the fastestmirror plugin. If you open the plugin with a text editor, the setup instructions at the top of the file.