Update packages available now for Fedora 16 Alpha on Power

[Phil Knirsch]

Hi everyone.

As we're making quite good progress on fixing issues for the upcoming 
Fedora 16 Beta on Power we wanted to make sure everyone can get the 
updates on his system.

We don't have a automated update syncing in place yet, but Dennis 
Gilmore is currently working on a solution that should make that 
possible for all secondary archs across the board.

In the meantime if you want to get the already available updates you'll 
have to follow the instructions that Karsten Hopp put together 
(shamelessly copy & pasted from 
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/PowerPC):

As we currently don't update the package repositories on the mirrors 
regularily, users of pre-releases of Fedora-16 for PowerPC who need to 
test packages that are newer than those in F16-Alpha (or later F16-Beta) 
have to manually add the repo containing the latest packages to their 
/etc/yum.repos.d directory. They need to create a new file, p.e. 
/etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-16-prerelease.repo with these contents:

[fedora-16-prerelease]
name=Fedora $releasever - $basearch - prerelease
failovermethod=priority
baseurl=http://ppc.koji.fedoraproject.org/mash/$releasever/$basearch/os/
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora-$basearch

Or on your F16 system, you can issue the following command to download 
the repo and put it in the correct place:

wget -O /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-16-prerelease.repo 
https://fedoraproject.org/w/uploads/7/71/Fedora-16-prerelease.repo

A fresh installation for F16-Beta (or F16-Final) when those are released 
is highly recommended so that you can verify that all reported and 
closed as fixed bugs have really been addressed in -Beta (or -Final).

Have fun & happy hacking,

Thanks & regards, Phil

-- 
Philipp Knirsch              | Tel.:  [phone]
Supervisor Core Services     | Fax.:  [phone]
Red Hat GmbH                 | Email: Phil Knirsch <pknirsch(a)redhat.com&gt;
Hauptstaetterstr. 58         | Web:   http://www.redhat.com/
D-70178 Stuttgart, Germany

[Robert Knight]

I've added the fedora-16-prerelease repo to three ppc systems on which 
I'm experimenting, two p720's and a Mac G5.  Updates went smoothly 
except that the installation of the updated kernel 
(kernel-3.1.0-7.fc16.ppc64) failed with the message

grubby fatal error: unable to find a suitable template

I've chased this down a bit and it appears to me to be a bug in grubby 
(grubby-8.3-1.fc16.ppc64).  Specifically, the code in the routine 
suitableImage builds a string called fullName which does not have a 
slash between the bootPrefix value and the rest of the name, so that the 
check for whether the file is readable fails.

I'm not the first one to have this error message from grubby.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=124246

stretches from 2004 to the present, for example.  Since there are a 
large number of cases where grubby issued that error message, they look 
to have accumulated in bug 124246.

There are other places in grubby.c where file names are formed.  I have 
not chased them all down.  I did use a hacked version of grubby which 
correctly forms the vmlinuz file name and I no longer got the grubby 
fatal error message.  It did not produce a yaboot.conf that was usable, 
however.  It was missing the initrd line.    It may be related to

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=725185

which is still open.

So, my questions are these:

1.  Is there a FAQ that will point me to how to search for bugzilla 
duplicates of these two problems?
2.  Should I just add to the entries with this new information?

and like that.

Regards,
Robert