Tue 13 May 2008
A new release of Fedora is out again so it is time to check out the upgrade. This time it is the Fedora 9 release. The upgrade from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9 is almost exactly like the upgrade to Fedora 8. Here are the steps you need to do the upgrade from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9:
As someone points out in the comments there is a new facility to do upgrades that you can install. See the following wiki entry about the PreUpgrade. I tried to use PreUpgrade but it didn't install the update boot option for some reason but maybe others will have better luck.
- yum update
- yum clean all
- I like to repeated update and clean all a second time to make sure everything got updated
- Run the following command to update the yum repo on your box:
rpm -Uhv http://mirror.liberty.edu/pub/fedora/linux/releases/9/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-9-2.noarch.rpm http://mirror.liberty.edu/pub/fedora/linux/releases/9/Fedora/i386/os/Packages/fedora-release-notes-9.0.0-1.noarch.rpm
- Next I had to do a "yum clean all" again before it picked up the change
- Next do a yum -y update
- As in the past, a few packages had to be removed to get the dependencies to work out. In this case I had to remove the beryl-manager, VirtualBox and cups. In the case of cups I noted what got removed so I could re-install it later.
- The packages have grown a little and this time I had to wait for 1.4G of packages to download and install. After an hour or so it was ready for a reboot.
- After a reboot I had problems getting my NVIDIA driver to load. I ended up having to download the latest beta version of the driver per this forum post: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=111460
- I recompiled my NVIDIA driver and then added the flag for X suggested in the forum. GDM wouldn't start because the flag was set there but I can live with that.
- Now I have X but I've run into a number of issues getting apps to run correctly. For example firefox won't start without the --sync option. At this point I think it will just be a matter of time before things get worked out, until then I'm just going to wait it out. At least it boots and mostly works.
Update: I think I may have found one of the issues with X and that is the fonts changed in Fedora 9. See Fedora 9 Fonts. I re-added the old fonts and now apps are starting correctly.
May 14th, 2008 at 7:12 am
Yeah you sure nipped it in the bud, why didn't you change the core version in your URL?
http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/fedora/linux/releases/8/
Should be:
http://mirror.anl.gov/pub/fedora/linux/releases/9/
I bet a few people have tried this already LOL
May 14th, 2008 at 7:55 am
I have corrected the RPMs. I guess that is what I get for it being so close to the last update.
May 14th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
hehe yeah when you said the words "almost exactly" I said yeah went exactly back to core 8
It would of been funny to see everyone wondering why they couldn't upgrade 
May 15th, 2008 at 12:11 am
could you say which fonts you installed exactly? I'm asking since i've just updated from 8 to 9 and am experiencing the same issues with apps crashing (or not starting)
May 15th, 2008 at 1:00 am
I'm having issues with X also. Apps not starting, non-movable windows with no borders etc. Do you have more detailed info as to how you rectified this??
May 15th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
Heya! First, thanks so much for doing these upgrade howto's. They've saved me a lot of time.
Second — can you tell me which exact font package(s) you had to add back in? Did you go back to the previous DejaVu, for example, or did you just re-add ones that were dropped? Haven't rebooted to 9 yet, and wanted to try to make sure I got everything first.
Thanks again for putting these together!
May 15th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
[...] to this post for the [...]
May 16th, 2008 at 5:57 am
If people have issues, why not post your logs and errors that show up within your log file. Other's cant read your mind
May 16th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Thanks for the post … now if only I could get the NVidia drivers for Fedora Core 9 to work. Wasted most of the day at work jerking around trying to get X to start. :((
May 17th, 2008 at 4:18 am
There seems to be a new bit of software in Fedora 9.0 which does the upgrade for you, called PreUpgrade.
su -c 'yum install preupgrade'
preupgrade
http://www.redhatmagazine.com/2008/04/15/interview-fedora-developers-seth-vidal-and-will-woods/
May 19th, 2008 at 11:49 pm
I'm having the problem with firefox (named color or font does not exist).
Which old font packages did you reinstall?
May 20th, 2008 at 1:43 am
I just got it to work:
as root:
# yum install xorg-x11-fonts-\*
# service xfs restart
May 21st, 2008 at 12:23 am
Thanks Carson, your info is very helpful.
Last night I upgraded my Fedora 8 box. Got a smoother installation and no need to remove any package for dependencies (even Cups got updated).
After rebooting only have some acl problems as squid updated to newer version 3.0.STABLE2-3.fc9.x86_64
May 25th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
A flawless upgrade from Fedora 8 to Fedora 9 using yum, but…
after reboot nothing works.
FireFox starts then closes as do most of the applications.
Konqueror works, somewhat.
Terminal works.
Any suggestions to get my system back to normal would be appreciated?
Thank you
Frank D Gunseor
June 3rd, 2008 at 5:13 am
Hi,
I've just installed Fedora 7, can I skip 8 and just upgrade to 9 ?
Regards,
Setya
June 5th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
[...] the answer is fairly simple: boot a suitable Fedora 8 image, then follow the instructions kindly provided by Carson McDonald on ioncannon.net - which, incidentally, is an invaluable [...]
June 5th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
I got fed up of using the default Fedora 8 AMI with EC2 due to a bug in MySQL and gave your instructions a try. The upgrade was smooth and error-free and my Fedora 9 image has been a joy to use. Thank you!
June 6th, 2008 at 11:49 am
Actually, to get things working with the 64-bit Fedora 8 AMI I had to enter the following before upgrading to the new release:
rpm -e --nodeps curl.x86_64 curl.i386
June 25th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
FWIW Preupgrade failed completely on my system. Didn't update the kernel, etc. etc.
Booted Ubuntu and used the procedure described here to recover. Basically the mess left by preupgrade took a day out of my life. Never again, just yum from now on.
To the folks with X problems. Unless you have some very obscure requirements, you can kill xfs. You can even:
yum remove xfs
to remove it completely and the system works better.
There are plenty of things that I like less in FC9, especially the ugly X login screen and I still have to play with feature like non-working power management which leaves the laptop backlight on all the time.
Spell checking in web forms doesn't work (just realized this typing here).
July 13th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Not that easy as from 7 to 8. I will post my notes here in case someone else gets into the same mess.
Error: Missing Dependency: curl = 7.18.2-1.fc8 is needed by package curl-devel
Error: Missing Dependency: libssl.so.6 is needed by package ckermit
Error: Missing Dependency: libcrypto.so.6 is needed by package dhcpv6_client
Error: Missing Dependency: perl(:MODULE_COMPAT_5.8.8) is needed by package newt-perl
Error: Missing Dependency: libcrypto.so.6 is needed by package ckermit
Error: Missing Dependency: perl(:MODULE_COMPAT_5.8.8) is needed by package perl-DateManip
This one was easy : yum remove curl-devel ckermit dhcpv6_client newt-perl DateManip
Running rpm_check_debug
ERROR with rpm_check_debug vs depsolve:
Package initscripts needs /sbin/pidof, this is not available.
Package cdecl needs libtermcap.so.2, this is not available.
Package chkfontpath needs /sbin/pidof, this is not available.
Complete!
Removed cdecl and chkfontpath.
The initscripts needs /sbin/pidof, this is not available was a bit more trouble there was hardly any relevant information on the net but
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/IA64/Workarounds#yum_update_complains:_initscripts_needs_.2Fsbin.2Fpidof.2C_this_is_not_available..22
This sites has the following steps:
rpm -e sysvinit --nodeps
yum install sysvinit-tools
yum install event-compat-sysv (did not exist)
Installed sysvinit again using : yum install sysvinit
Okay almost there but then:
Transaction Check Error:
file /usr/sbin/vipw from install of shadow-utils-4.1.1-2.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package util-linux-2.13-0.54.1.fc7.i386
file /usr/share/man/man8/vipw.8.gz from install of shadow-utils-4.1.1-2.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package util-linux-2.13-0.54.1.fc7.i386
Odd there was a FC7 util-linux still hanging somewhere. I removed this one using rpm –e util-linux –nodeps and installed it again using yum install util-linux. (do not use ‘yum remove’ the package has a dep link to over 100 system critical packages!)
Ran the transaction again and yeah about 1400 packages where updated time for coffee… After the completed message I installed the packages removed by hand and ran the ‘yum update’ then rebooted and it came up again just fine.
August 5th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Just Remember that if you are running a 64-bit version of fedora to adjust the URI:
rpm -Uhv http://mirror.liberty.edu/pub/fedora/linux/releases/9/Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/fedora-release-9-2.noarch.rpm http://mirror.liberty.edu/pub/fedora/linux/releases/9/Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/fedora-release-notes-9.0.0-1.noarch.rpm
August 18th, 2008 at 6:21 am
To upgrade to 9 version, have today:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/PreUpgrade
September 28th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
Hi!
For the upgrade you need the newkey stuff also.
rpm -Uhv ftp://ftp.quicknet.nl/pub/Linux/download.fedora.redhat.com/updates/9/i386/fedora-release-9-5.transition.noarch.rpm
Bye,
Raymond.
October 6th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
I found that the following:
yum update fedora-release
Helps with missing dependencies
October 28th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Thanx, Daniel!
After a couple of hours truing to update F8 to F9 on remote host, I try your solution and everythig works.
Right sequece to update x86_64:
yum update
yum clean all
rpm -Uhv http://FAVORITE.MIRROR/pub/fedora/linux/releases/9/Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/fedora-release-9-2.noarch.rpm http://FAVORITE.MIRROR/pub/fedora/linux/releases/9/Fedora/x86_64/os/Packages/fedora-release-notes-9.0.0-1.noarch.rpm
yum clean all
yum update fedora-release