Preupgrade from F17 to F18 Branched

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2012-08-15 at 16:19 -0400, John.Florian at dart.biz wrote:
> Hi All, 
> 
> I'm new to preupgrade and playing with Fedora test builds (alpha,
> beta, TC, RC or otherwise), but hardly new to Fedora.  I'm hoping to
> do some early testing of F18 before it's released so I've built myself
> a F17 VM, fully updated it and have started the whole preupgrade
> process.  I think I've run into a bug or two, but ... as I said, I'm
> new to this. 

This is probably a terrible time to try preupgrade. It gets no major
love until Beta, usually. If your goal is a working install of F18, your
best option at present is a yum update from F17, following the
directions at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading_Fedora_using_yum#Fedora_17_-.3E_Fedora_18 . Or you can wait a week or two and get the Alpha release when it comes out.

> I've got a local mirror of development/{18,rawhide} due to a mandated
> proxy and in general, the wish to reinstall fast many times, if
> needed.  I'm attempting preupgrade via ssh since I did a minimal
> install of F17 and have no X server installed on the VM.   
> 
> Issue #1: 
> According to
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/Branched#Upgrade_from_any_previous_release_via_Preupgrade_and_Anaconda, I should be able to select "Fedora 18 (Branched)".  Maybe that would work, maybe not.  For my first few attempts preupgrade just hung: 
> 
> preupgrade-cli -d5 -v "Fedora 18 (Branched)" 
> Loaded plugins: blacklist, whiteout 
> No plugin match for: rpm-warm-cache 
> No plugin match for: remove-with-leaves 
> No plugin match for: auto-update-debuginfo 
> No plugin match for: refresh-packagekit 
> No plugin match for: presto 
> Not loading "blacklist" plugin, as it is disabled 
> Not loading "whiteout" plugin, as it is disabled 
> Config time: 0.007 
> ^C^C 
> Exiting. 
> 
> A debug message here would have been helpful.  Admittedly, I did not
> trying higher debug levels -- I didn't see any ranges documented so it
> just seemed a time waste to blindly poke around.  Figuring that I was
> waiting for a network timeout, I interrupted it and did some more
> reading about how to use a local mirror from
> here:http://oliver.net.au/?p=188.  I grabbed a copy of
> http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/releases.txt and didn't see any
> mention of "Fedora 18 (Branched)" as indicated on the Wiki.  I edited
> this copy to include my own  "Fedora 18 (Branched)" section that
> referenced my local mirror and then got much further. 

It's probably a little early post-F18 for all this to be in place, but
releases.txt does need updating.

> 
> Issue #2: 
> preupgrade got busy doing lots of stuff that looked reasonable, but
> then ended thusly: 
> 
> Preparing system to boot into installer 
> DEBUG /sbin/grubby --title="Upgrade to Fedora 18 (Branched)"
> --remove-kernel="/boot/upgrade/vmlinuz"
> --add-kernel="/boot/upgrade/vmlinuz"
> --initrd="/boot/upgrade/initrd.img" --args="preupgrade
> repo=hd::/var/cache/yum/preupgrade
>  ks=hd:UUID=6ed39ed0-5dab-472b-8aa0-e0c42e3264d6:/upgrade/ks.cfg
> stage2=hd:UUID=6ed39ed0-5dab-472b-8aa0-e0c42e3264d6:/upgrade/squashfs.img ksdevice=link" 
> sh: /sbin/grub: No such file or directory 
> /bin/echo: write error: Broken pipe 
> All finished. The upgrade will begin when you reboot. 
> 
> Once the upgrade starts, a VNC server will open on port 5901. 
> Use it to monitor progress or fix problems that may arise. 
> 
> Are those errors to be expected? 

I think yes.

> 
> Issue #3: 
> I rebooted the VM, saw the new "Fedora 18 (Branched)" choice in grub's
> menu, but it was not the default and so the system booted back into
> F17.  Since I have a console to the VM, I can "assist" it along, but I
> suspect that shouldn't be required, right?

Yes, but this bug was actually present in F17 too and is apparently
rather hard to fix correctly. See
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=821739 .
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net