Upgrading CentOS 5 to Fedora 12

12 Responses to “Upgrading CentOS 5 to Fedora 12”

  1. Amir:

    Wow! It’s very impressive how you write everything down for yourself; and after all that you took the pain to make it so others can follow your footsteps – even more impressive!

  2. Oded:

    Thanks. If there’s demand, I try to oblige :-)

  3. butters:

    Thanks dude. This is a very helpful step by step guide. You tell me howto do it and why, I’ve learned a lot, _

    In the “Its All Downhill From Here” section, I had to install more rpms to make YUM work:

    abrt-libs
    eggdbus
    libidn
    libstdc++
    nss-devel
    polkit

    And after I upgraded kernel, the new initramfs didn’t work, I have to login use the old centos kernel, and run “depmod && dracut” to generate a initramfs file. Did you encounter this problem?

  4. Oded:

    Hi butters – thanks for the comments.

    Regarding the additional packages: I haven’t seen the need, but if people have problems with that step they can also add these additional packages, so thanks for listing them.

    Regarding the missing initial ramfs – this is covered in the article in the “Just about done” stage (which is not the “that is all” stage, so you should have also followed that part :-) ).

  5. butters:

    Yes, I did recreate inital ramfs file metioned in “that is all” stage. But after I run “yum update -y” to upgrade packages (from the offical repos), the initial ramdisk could not work at more. I’m not sure why this happens…

  6. Oded:

    That is weird – the only reason the initial ramdisk would fail after the upgrade is if the upgrade also changed the kernel associated with the ramdisk, and that shouldn’t happen because you’re supposed to upgrade the kernel to the latest version right before generating the ramdisk.

    If you have any more information, please share – I’d like to get to the bottom of this :-)

  7. Alan Horrocks:

    Hi, in ‘building required software’ everything works up to step 9 – building rpm 4.7.
    This fails to produce any rpms ends with an error about unpackaged files. I guess this is kind of a show stopper. My system is Centos 5.4, fully up to date.
    I’ve attached the output from the rpmbuild command: (sorry it’s so long)

    Tried with both 4.7.0 and 4.7.1 same results.

    [Output removed by editor]

  8. Oded:

    The output you pasted was cut short before the interesting part, probably due to WordPress comments size limit :-(

    If you want, you can e-mail me the output and I will try to help with that, or you can pastebin.com the output and link it here.

  9. Alan Horrocks:

    Hi, I thought that might happen. Here’s the output on pastebin.com

    http://pastebin.com/uA7Uw2vx

  10. Oded:

    You have debug info build enabled, and RPM 4.7 doesn’t play nice with old-style debug packages.

    You can disable debug symbol generation by adding “debug_package {nil}” to /etc/rpm/macros: http://www.redhat.com/archives/rpm-list/2005-November/msg00023.html

    • Alan Horrocks:

      Cheers, that sorted it.

      Unfortunately I had all kinds of other issues – like rpm removing libraries that other system components where relying on (most notably libnss which basically stops anything useful from working). I did manage to get a bit further but in the end I think this is my cue to just ditch Centos and use something else.

      Thanks for your help anyway – and if anyone else is considering doing this, definitely consider just using the Fedora CD to do the upgrade for you.

  11. Oded:

    Well, I did mention as such at the start :-) .

    There are some issues with the process, but I think I made sure that no system libraries are left out in the cold in my process. Though I did start from a rather empty system and if you have additional non-default libraries and services on the machine in question, you might run into trouble with that – though I believe this is out of scope from the current article.

    That being said, I want to readdress the whole process, especially due to CentOS 5.5 coming out, but also because – as AJ mentioned – I should provide pre-built packages for the “Building Required Software” stage instead of forcing people to rebuild it themselves.

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