F7 to F8 upgrade - Anaconda nightmare

[Karl Larsen]

Paul Smith wrote:
> On Dec 2, 2007 1:32 PM, Timothy Murphy <tim at birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie> wrote:
>   
>> I tried upgrading a ThinkPad T43 from Fedora 7 to 8
>> and met the familiar hanging syndrome.
>>
>> I followed the recipe
>> at <http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/F8Common>,
>> downloading
>> <http://katzj.fedorapeople.org/updates-f8-yumloop.img>
>> and appending "updates" to the kernel command.
>>
>> The latter seemed to work, since /tmp/updates
>> contained the updates*.img file
>> (and all other files in the same directory).
>>
>> However, I saw no evidence that the updates*.img file
>> was actually invoked.
>> In any case, the hanging was not cured.
>>
>> I wondered how anaconda knows which file to use to update?
>> Does it use all *.img files?
>> Is one meant to change the name of the downloaded file?
>>
>> As far as I can tell, Anaconda upgrade has not worked
>> for most people - it worked for me on one computer,
>> but not on a second.
>> This is not good;
>> if the developers cannot get anaconda to upgrade reasonably well
>> they should remove the option.
>>
>> As a practical matter, I did not see any way
>> of determining what exactly anaconda was doing
>> during the eternal "Checking dependencies ...".
>> If one knew it was stuck checking dependencies on one file
>> it would be easy to tell that the process had failed.
>> As it is, there seems to be no way of knowing
>> except to wait for several hours.
>>
>> Anaconda: 1 out of 10.
>>     
>
> You may want to consider upgrading your machines with yum. Check:
>
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq
>
> Maybe, in the future, the yum way will be the recommended method to
> upgrade Fedora distributions. (Ubuntu does so already.) For now, it
> seems to work well, although they say
>
> "Although upgrades with yum have been tested and work, live upgrades
> are not recommended by the Fedora Project".
>
> Paul
>
>   
    In the past Fedora was easy to update from cd-rom's of the new 
version. But around FC6 it became more difficult and I recall the many 
complaints about cd-rom/dvd updates to F7.

    I'm not smart enough to know why this longer works well. But for my 
computer I have many systems loaded from DVD and they all were easy to 
do and work fine.

Karl



-- 

	Karl F. Larsen, AKA K5DI
	Linux User
	#450462   http://counter.li.org.