F16 Beta yum upgrade and initial impressions report

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2011-10-07 at 12:07 -0400, Jonathan Kamens wrote:
> I did a yum distro-sync upgrade last night from F15 to F16 beta on my
> x86_64 desktop with an ASUS P5Q SE2 motherboard. Here are the problems
> I encountered and my initial impressions.
> 
> I've been away from this list for a while, so forgive me if some of
> these issues have already been brought up here.
> 
> My machine wouldn't boot after the upgrade. When it got the point
> where grub should have started doing something, it displayed a black
> screen with the dreaded "Error 18" message at the top. I did a little
> research and discovered that grub is being replaced with grub2 in F16.
> I don't know if this replacement would have happened automatically if
> I'd used preupgrade instead of yum distro-sync. 

It should, but at present it doesn't entirely work. Regular anaconda
upgrades do. Mostly.

> Here's what I had to do to solve the problem:
>      1. Boot from an install DVD in rescue mode.
>      2. Copy the os-prober and grub2 RPMs from the install DVD
>         into /mnt/sysimage.
>      3. Chroot to /mnt/sysimage and do the following:
>              1. "rpm -e grub" and "rpm -U os-prober*.rpm grub2*.rpm".
>              2. Run "/sbin/grub2-mkdevicemap --no-floppy" to avoid bug
>                 732076.
>              3. Generate a grub2 config with "/sbin/grub2-mkconfig
>                 > /boot/grub2/grub.cfg".
>      4. "/sbin/grub2-install /dev/sda".
> I don't know if grub is supposed to keep working in F16 for people who
> don't want to switch over to grub2. If so, then there's clearly a
> problem here, although I'm not going to file a bug about it because
> like I said I don't know if it's supposed to keep working.

We're not really supporting it, but in practice, it mostly ought to keep
working - there's no intrinsic reason why not. It did break on my laptop
too, though, for whatever that's worth.

> I had cups enabled to start on boot in F15. That was lost in the
> upgrade to F16. I've filed bug 744223 about this. It was closed with a
> comment that I should use "use systemd-sysv-convert --apply cups" to
> carry over the settings. I have to say that I think this is incredibly
> poor design. If I'm a user doing an upgrade, I sure as hell do not
> want to have to go through every single upgraded package and carry
> over all the settings automatically. The transition from SysV to
> systemd should have included the design and implementation of a
> mechanism for carrying over this information automatically. I had the
> same problem with saslauthd.
> 
> There's a similar problem with openvpn, but "systemd-sysv-convert
> --apply openvpn" doesn't solve it. I've filed bug 744244 about this.
> 
> Is there a way to get systemctl to list services that are not enabled?
> I couldn't find one.

systemctl --all | grep service | grep inactive is a rough approximation.

> After the upgrade from F15 to F16, suspend on idle got turned on,
> i.e., the "Suspend when inactive for:" setting in the "Power" pane of
> the system settings app, even though it certainly wasn't turned on
> before the upgrade. I've filed bug 744257 about this.

This has already been discussed on this list and devel. It's fixed in
the next gnome-power-manager release, I think.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net