June 1, 2019

Fedora 30 -- upgrade via DNF

I will first do my home system (trona). This system has an SSD for a system drive, and that usually saves me at least an hour doing an upgrade.

The upgrade from 29 to 30

I already have the upgrade plugin, so I show the command to install that commented out below. 
su
dnf upgrade --refresh	(yields: nothing to do)
#dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade
dnf system-upgrade download --refresh --releasever=30
dnf system-upgrade reboot

I begin the above process (using my cable modem link) at 10:12 AM.

It wants to install 91 and upgrade 2747 packages. I say yes of course, and away it goes downloading 2840 packages. It wants to import a key for virtualbox, but I see that request right away (sometimes I go off to do something else during an upgrade, and come back only to find out it is waiting for input. It wants to import more keys after all 2840 packages have been downloaded. By 10:30, the download is finished (20 minutes) And by 10:35 it is happy and ready for the "reboot".

When I type "dnf system-upgrade reboot", it does indeed almost immediately reboot -- and runs F29 in a single user mode while it installs 5622 items. This takes about 30 minutes. Then it reboots again and voila! We are running F30.

No package conflicts or issues of any kind. No hassle with acroread (it remains installed across the install).

All told, the upgrade took just under an hour.

The aftermath

I get my XFCE session back intact, with my desktop image and all. I am running a 5.1.5-300 kernel. Networking is fine. Thunderbird and Chrome are fine.

Miracle of miracles, sound still works!

Ruby issues

This keeps turning up like a bad coin on every upgrade. Maybe I should give up on ruby and switch to Python. We could trade an elegant language for a stable development environment and a crappy language. Maybe. Truth be known, the trouble comes from the gem package system, not the language itself.

The messages look like this (followed by traceback and failure due to glib2 being missing). 

Ignoring atk-3.3.6 because its extensions are not built. Try: gem pristine atk --version 3.3.6
Ignoring glib2-3.3.6 because its extensions are not built. Try: gem pristine glib2 --version 3.3.6
Ignoring sqlite3-1.4.0 because its extensions are not built. Try: gem pristine sqlite3 --version 1.4.0
Here is what I do: 
su
gem install rake
gem install atk
gem install glib2
gem install sqlite3
exit
cd
rm -rf .gem
This gets me up and running again. The second time that local gems have caused trouble.

Another machine (at work - 10-2-2019)

This had no issues whatsoever. It took 10 minutes to download the packages (the are on the same LAN on our local mirror). I took almost 2 hours to install them after the reboot (so there were 2 hours where my machine was not usable).

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / [email protected]