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Posted on 6/19/2009 10:26:00 am by Nicolas and filed under , ,

Fedora 11 has been released for a while now. The upgrade from my Fedora 10 installation was relatively pain-free and Fedora 11 runs happily on my system. Upgrading did not bring any stunning revolutions and, as I'm not using ext4 yet, the most noticeable change from my point of view is certainly the 20 seconds start-up.

Now, some forewords of wisdom...
WARNING1: It is not possible to upgrade directly from Fedora 9 to Fedora 11. You must upgrade to Fedora 10 first. Do not attempt an upgrade from Fedora 9 to Fedora 11!
WARNING2: Make sure you backup important data before you upgrade. It does have to be complicated: use rsync or tar to do this.
WARNING3: The yum update step should NOT run inside a graphical session (Gnome or KDE or whatever you favorite GDM is). This could result in a unusable install. Updates should be run in a vty, runlevel 3, or a screen session.

That being said, let's get into the details!


1. Prepare for the upgrade
First we need to upgrade the RPM package via yum update rpm. During this step, I encountered the error:
[nicolas@munin /TEMP]# yum update rpm
(...)
rpmdb: Program version 4.7 doesn't match environment version 4.5
error: db4 error(-30971) from dbenv->open: DB_VERSION_MISMATCH:
Database environment version mismatch
(...)

The solution was to clean up the install *manually* prior to updating RPM:
yum clean all
rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*
rpm --rebuilddb
yum -y update
yum update rpm

If you notice that a new kernel got installed during yum -y update, you have to reboot the system. After the reboot, log in as root again either directly or via sudo.
Finally, we need to clean the yum cache:
yum clean all

2. Upgrade
Here is the upgrade process itself. We can do this with preupgrade, which will also take care of your RPMFusion packages and start a nice handy GUI. Install preupgrade, then start the utility:
yum install preupgrade
preupgrade

The preupgrade wizard will then start... Just follow the indications of the screen and you'll be off with a flashy new Fedora 11 installation!

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