January 2006 - WLUG - wlug.mailman3.com

Re: Rough upgrade to FC4

by Larry Underhill

On Sun, 2006-01-22 at 22:13 -0500, Bill Mills-Curran wrote: > I feel lucky that I didn't brick my system. What did I do wrong? > This must be a common occurance. I have another system that I need to > upgrade, but I don't want it to go like this. What's a better way? Hey there Bill. Sorry to hear about your upgrade woes. On my fedora boxen, I avoid up2date. (although I have had great experience with it on the RHEL distro with Red Hat Network) I'm a big fan of yum. I think Seth Vidal has done a great job with it and I have used it to upgrade several systems. I have taken one box (standard LAMP stuff) from FC1 => FC4 with no problems. After a backup of /var and /home, my general procedure is to: a) 'yum update' my box to ensure latest/greatest from the Fedora Base and Fedora Updates repositories. b) manually install fedora-release RPM. c) manually install yum rpm for the release (in your case FC4) that you are upgrade to. d) double check that I have GPG check enabled in my yum config files and I also have the correct keys on my ring. e) do a sanity check that I have good network connectivity to the remote repository that I am going to pull my RPMs from (personally, I've settled on mirrors.kernel.org) f) yum upgrade g) review the list of packages it marks for upgrade and the associated dependency checking for sanity. h) cross fingers. hit 'Y'. go get coffee. Best of luck, --Larry

Jan. 23, 2006

Re: Rough upgrade to FC4

by Matthew Gillen

Bill Mills-Curran wrote: > Running up2date did not help -- I was still in an FC3 system (kind of). > > I manually installed the FC4 kernel and ran up2date again, but it was > stuck on many packages, because up2date only wanted to freshen > existing rpm's -- it didn't want to add any new ones to solve > dependencies. That's why you're almost always better off using 'yum' instead of 'up2date'. Yum is smart enough to track down and install dependencies for you. I would abandon using up2date unless you're using RedHat Enterprise Linux (which you're obviously not). You'd still have the same problem with yum that you had with up2date regarding the "system thinks it's FC3 instead of FC4" issue (hint: manually update an rpm by the name of "fedora-release") --Matt

Jan. 23, 2006

Re: Rough upgrade to FC4

by Matthew Gillen

Bill Mills-Curran wrote: > I feel lucky that I didn't brick my system. What did I do wrong? > This must be a common occurance. I have another system that I need to > upgrade, but I don't want it to go like this. What's a better way? You didn't do anything wrong, you just took an unexpected upgrade path. In the future though, you may find these guys helpful: http://fedora.isphuset.no/ They rebuild the install ISO images periodically *with* the latest updates. Their main point is to reduce update-time after you install, but I think you discovered an even more compelling reason for them to do what they're doing. Note: those are unofficial images. That said, I've used them and they worked fine for me. --Matt

Jan. 23, 2006

Re: [Wlug] Rough upgrade to FC4

by Chuck Anderson

On Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 10:13:27PM -0500, Bill Mills-Curran wrote: > I just upgraded to FC4 from FC3 and I had some troubles that should > not have happened. My FC3 system was current with updates, and I used > downloaded ISO's from fedora. The problem was that many of the FC3 > packages were more up to date than the FC4 packages, so the upgrade > did not install them. This included the kernel. I felt lucky that I > had a workable system. This this is a known problem. glibc in FC3 was updated to one newer than any available glibc for FC4, causing most of the system to not upgrade. > Running up2date did not help -- I was still in an FC3 system (kind of). Try using 'yum update' instead. up2date is not really being maintained as the way forward, and it isn't beat on as heavily as yum. Also, try first removing all old kernels, leaving just the newest (2.6.12-1.1381_FC3), and manually downgrade glibc to the latest FC4 one. > I feel lucky that I didn't brick my system. What did I do wrong? > This must be a common occurance. I have another system that I need to > upgrade, but I don't want it to go like this. What's a better way? Yeah, the maintainer of the glibc package doesn't think this is important enough to fix right away: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=172823 It seems that the Fedora developers now recommend re-installs as opposed to upgrades, which is a shame since Fedora Core and Red Hat Linux before it were always known for their stellar upgradeability. Hopefully with the formation of the Fedora Foundation, more and more of Fedora Core itself will be community-maintained, where people who care about such things as upgradeability can make sure that goal is maintained.

Jan. 23, 2006

Re: Rough upgrade to FC4

by Joshua D. Abraham

On Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 10:24:43PM -0500, nmeyers(a)javalinux.net wrote: > On Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 10:13:27PM -0500, Bill Mills-Curran wrote: > > I just upgraded to FC4 from FC3 and I had some troubles that should > > not have happened. My FC3 system was current with updates, and I used > > downloaded ISO's from fedora. The problem was that many of the FC3 > > packages were more up to date than the FC4 packages, so the upgrade > > did not install them. This included the kernel. I felt lucky that I > > had a workable system. > > Sorry to hear things haven't gotten any better since my days as > an RH user (pre-RH9). I never experienced a smooth upgrade; sometimes > had to just rebuild the system. > Agreed. I have been using Redhat since 6.2. I had partitions setup the following way /boot / swap /home /usr/local/ This way I can keep the users data and just install a new system over it. I think that Debian's method of package management is the best of any of the Linux Distro's. I a year ago I switched from FC3 to Ubuntu because Ubuntu has a 6 month release cycle, similar to FC and Ubuntu pays individuals to fix security vulnerabilities. --Josh > I drifted from RH to Mandrake (pre-Mandriva) and then to Gentoo. > Though not without the occasional bump, I've found Gentoo's approach to > package management the least violent of them all. > > Nathan > > > > > Running up2date did not help -- I was still in an FC3 system (kind of). > > > > I manually installed the FC4 kernel and ran up2date again, but it was > > stuck on many packages, because up2date only wanted to freshen > > existing rpm's -- it didn't want to add any new ones to solve > > dependencies. > > > > After much arm-wrestling (floundering?), I gave up on the GUI up2date > > and ran with the command line, feeding it chunks of rpms that needed > > updating. > > > > I feel lucky that I didn't brick my system. What did I do wrong? > > This must be a common occurance. I have another system that I need to > > upgrade, but I don't want it to go like this. What's a better way? > > > > Thanks, > > Bill > > _______________________________________________ > > Discuss mailing list > > Discuss(a)blu.org > > http://olduvai.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss > > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > Discuss(a)blu.org > http://olduvai.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss

Jan. 23, 2006

Rough upgrade to FC4

by Bill Mills-Curran

I just upgraded to FC4 from FC3 and I had some troubles that should not have happened. My FC3 system was current with updates, and I used downloaded ISO's from fedora. The problem was that many of the FC3 packages were more up to date than the FC4 packages, so the upgrade did not install them. This included the kernel. I felt lucky that I had a workable system. Running up2date did not help -- I was still in an FC3 system (kind of). I manually installed the FC4 kernel and ran up2date again, but it was stuck on many packages, because up2date only wanted to freshen existing rpm's -- it didn't want to add any new ones to solve dependencies. After much arm-wrestling (floundering?), I gave up on the GUI up2date and ran with the command line, feeding it chunks of rpms that needed updating. I feel lucky that I didn't brick my system. What did I do wrong? This must be a common occurance. I have another system that I need to upgrade, but I don't want it to go like this. What's a better way? Thanks, Bill

Jan. 23, 2006

Re: [Wlug] SSH Tunneling?

by Mike Frysinger

On Friday 20 January 2006 14:28, Michael Zarozinski wrote: > I'm in the process of moving a web site, msql db, and some game daemons > to a new server. While the DNS transfer is in process we want all > traffic to go to the new server. I've been told this can be done vial > ssh tunnels but don't have any experience.... can anyone point me in the > right direction? read `man ssh` ... then when the directions are a little hard to grok, use these examples: ssh -L 1234:localhost:25 vapier(a)wh0rd.org -N -f this will create a ssh tunnel from my localhost:1234 to remote wh0rd.org:25 and after authentication is finished, the ssh process will detach > Do I need to set up a tunnel for every port on the old > server (the games open ports)? How is it set up to run all the time? Do > I need to mess with sshd_config? i'm pretty sure ssh can only tunnel tcp ports, not udp, so you'd be out of luck ... also, all communication would be encrypted, so you would see a perf hit in terms of how much data you can move -mike

Jan. 22, 2006

Subject: Re: [Wlug] Trial By Fire

by Tom Misilo

for all mozilla packages visit their project dir heres a link for thunderbird http://suse.cs.utah.edu/projects/mozilla/thunderbird/1.5/ for all the mozilla stuff http://suse.cs.utah.edu/projects/mozilla/ Tom > On 1/21/06, Marie MacDonald <mimsresearch(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > Do downloadable software packages for Linux come with intallers? > > It depends. Many do but some require a few more steps. If you stick > with installing SW via yast, you'll have the easiest time. > > > Can anyone help with advice for YaSt? Is my issue with the Thunderbird > > 1.5 package perhaps? > > Perhaps the recent Novell distro is different, but I've never seen > Thunderbird in the Yast repository (I'm still using SuSE 9.3). > Anytime I want Firefox or Thunderbird, I go direct to > http://www.mozilla.com and download it there. What you download there > has an installer built in. > > > Quite frankly if it's this hard (frustrating!) to install software, I'm > > not gonna be a happy gal. I still have other things I want to add to > > this snappy little computer (i.e. my Palm) but darn there's gotta be an > > easier way. Spring semester starts 26 January and I need this up and > > running. > > You sound determined and that's probably the most important trait for > someone trying to stick with Linux. Stick with YaST as much as > possible and post here for other specific questions--we'll get you > through. > > BR

Jan. 22, 2006

Perl Unicode question

by Skip Gaede

Folks, I'm trying to understand how Unicode works in Perl 5.8.7, and things are not working the way they're described in perluniintro. In particular, I have a file encoded in UTF-8 from Perl, that I want to convert to Windows Unicode (UCS-16LE). The intro provides this snippet for converting from one character set to another: open(my $nihongo, '<:encoding(iso2022-jp)', 'text.jis'); open(my $unicode, '>:utf8', 'text.utf8'); while (<$nihongo>) { print $unicode } When I try that, substituting UTF-8 and ':encoding(UTF-16LE)', I get no warnings, but the output has twice as many characters as it should have and they are all NULLs. I can supply a my UTF-8 file if anyone wants to have a try. In particular, I think the fact that I have embedded apostrophes (0x27) encoded as RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK (0x2019) may be part of the problem. Thanks, Skip

Jan. 22, 2006

Re: [Wlug] Trial By Fire

by Jared Greenwald

If you're not particularly married to SuSE, I'd say to give ubuntu a try. It has about the best package management out there (second only to Gentoo's portage, imho). On 1/21/06, Brett Russ <bruss(a)alum.wpi.edu> wrote: > On 1/21/06, Marie MacDonald <mimsresearch(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > Do downloadable software packages for Linux come with intallers? > > It depends. Many do but some require a few more steps. If you stick > with installing SW via yast, you'll have the easiest time. > > > Can anyone help with advice for YaSt? Is my issue with the Thunderbird > > 1.5 package perhaps? > > Perhaps the recent Novell distro is different, but I've never seen > Thunderbird in the Yast repository (I'm still using SuSE 9.3). > Anytime I want Firefox or Thunderbird, I go direct to > http://www.mozilla.com and download it there. What you download there > has an installer built in. > > > Quite frankly if it's this hard (frustrating!) to install software, I'm > > not gonna be a happy gal. I still have other things I want to add to > > this snappy little computer (i.e. my Palm) but darn there's gotta be an > > easier way. Spring semester starts 26 January and I need this up and > > running. > > You sound determined and that's probably the most important trait for > someone trying to stick with Linux. Stick with YaST as much as > possible and post here for other specific questions--we'll get you > through. > > BR > > _______________________________________________ > Wlug mailing list > Wlug(a)mail.wlug.org > http://mail.wlug.org/mailman/listinfo/wlug >

Jan. 21, 2006