F11 -> F12 woes

Kevin J. Cummings cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
Mon Apr 5 03:41:45 UTC 2010


What started as a hard drive replacement (I filled up my 100GB laptop
drive) and bought a new 320GB replacement, ended up as an (unwanted, but
purely my fault) F11->F12 upgrade and I'm still having problems with
some of the previously working functionality of F11 not working on F12.

(Make me wonder what's going to happen when I get around to upgrading my
F10 home server to:  F11?  F12??  F13???)

Long story short:

I tarred up 3 partitions and saved them to a USB external hard drive.
I replaced the internal hard drive with the new one.
I spend much time determining that my DVD-RW drive was really broken
  and had to figure out how to put a liveCD on a 16GB USBkey.
I used the liveCD to partition the new hard drive and and copy the data
  back to it.

When I finished, I made sure the new root partition was bootable, and
had grub properly installed to it.  Upon rebooting, it hung after
booting to the initrd image.  My problem was that I forgot to LABEL the
root partition when I formatted it, so grub was unable to "find" my root
partition.  Before I figured this out, I put the new Fedora Unity F12
DVD (20100303) on the USBkey and did the F11->F12 upgrade.  There was
one small problem *after* installing all of the F12 packages from the
DVD.  It occurred during the "cleanup" phase, and I ended up with a
number of fc11 and fc12 versions of some RPMs installed.  I've cleaned
most of them up (see below).  [Note, there is nothing in the update.log
nor the update.log.syslog files about this error though.  I told
anaconda to "save" the error info, but I can't find it.   grumble!]

When F12 didn't boot either is when I realized that the root partition
was missing its label.  After I labeled it properly, F12 booted.

OK, so I could have saved myself a lot of grief had I realized this
while I was still at F11....   B^)

It was when I started my "yum update" once F12 had booted that I noticed
all the duplicate package problems.  I was able to fix a number of them
by hand.  I had over 500 packages to update anyways....   B^{
A number of smaller yum updates, some yum removes, and some "rpm -e
--justdb" of some of the extra fc11 RPMs got me to where I am now.

My current F12 problems:

1)  suspend no longer works.  I had this same problem initially on F11,
but was able to work around it by adding "nomodeset" to my kernel grub
lines.  I have a 3yo Radeon graphics card that does not yet work
properly (at least on F11) with the new kernel mode setting stuff.
Unfortunately, now, even *with* the nomodeset, suspend never finishes on
F12.

Here is the tail of /var/log/pm-suspend.log:

> Sun Apr  4 13:30:44 EDT 2010: performing suspend
> /usr/lib64/pm-utils/pm-functions: line 259: echo: write error: Device or resource busy
> Sun Apr  4 13:30:47 EDT 2010: Awake.
> Sun Apr  4 13:30:47 EDT 2010: Running hooks for resume

I wish I could tell *what* device or resource is busy....

2)  From time to time, my wireless (all networking?) comes up disabled
in NM.  This may be related to a failed suspend or shutdown.  I haven't
tracked it down yet.  I've been doing a lot of shutdown/reboot instead
of suspending.  B^)

3)  Chromium repo is not working for F12?

I get the following message when I use yum:

> chromium                                                                                       | 1.3 kB     00:00     
> http://spot.fedorapeople.org/chromium/F12/repodata/repomd.xml: [Errno -1] repo not up-to-date
> Trying other mirror.

What's amusing is that my last chromium install was from 3/30/10 on F11.
 Why is the F11 repo working and the F12 not?  (This is not a biggie for me)

4)  I have 10 packages that I am having problems bringing up to date
properly:

> PIL.x86_64                1.1.6-10.fc12   atrpms                
> libvcdinfo0.x86_64        0.7.23-9.fc12   atrpms                
> python.x86_64             2.6.2-4.fc12    updates               
> python-devel.x86_64       2.6.2-4.fc12    updates               
> python-imaging-tk.x86_64  1.1.6-17.fc12   fedora                
> python-libs.x86_64        2.6.2-4.fc12    updates               
> redhat-lsb.x86_64         3.2-7.fc12      fedora                
> tkinter.x86_64            2.6.2-4.fc12    updates               
> vcdimager.x86_64          0.7.23-11.fc12  rpmfusion-free-updates
> vcdimager-libs.x86_64     0.7.23-11.fc12  rpmfusion-free-updates

OK, yes, part of this is the dreaded ATRPMs/RPMFusion conflict.  I have
gotten around this in the past by playing games with the RPM database.
But, in the end, it comes back to bite me every upgrade.  Yes, this is
not a Fedora problem, but a 3rd party repo problem.  But this time it is
keeping python\*, redhat-lsb, and tkinter from updating properly
(possibly with the cleanup error from the upgrade).

5)  I have been using the "Earth from Space" desktop background.  On
FC6, F9, and F11, it filled the entire 1200x800 desktop space.  On F12,
it is "SCALED" instead of "FILL SCREEN", and has white side bars.  I can
change it to "FILL SCREEN", or I can change to another background, but
if I then change to another virtual desktop, the "Earth from Space"
desktop returns (scaled instead of fill screen) after about 5 seconds.
I cannot keep any changes I make.  This is frustrating.  Is there a
"hidden" gnome setting I am missing?  At this point, I don't care if I
can "stretch" the Earth background, or choose another, so long as it stays.

6)  VMware-server 2.0.2 doesn't compile.  I have found some "patches"
that are supposed to work here:

>
http://radu.cotescu.com/2010/01/19/how-to-install-vmware-server-ubuntu-fedora-opensuse/#comment-2074

I'm tracking this down.  I had it working on F11 (with a number of
compiler warnings) with a different set of patches.  From what I can
tell, this is VMWare's fault, not Fedora's as VMWare workstation and
VMWare Player do not seem to have this problem on F12....  I have this
problem every time I upgrade to a new kernel series.  I am running the
2.6.32.10 kernel right now, but I also have the previous 2.6.31.12
kernel installed.

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at rcn.com
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)


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