Fedora upgrade problems solved?

Just to follow up from last week's post on my problems upgrading my x86_64 workstation to Fedora 10, I think I now have everything fully functional once again.

The booting/grub problems were definitely related to grub's attempted probing for a floppy drive (/var/log/messages will show kernel I/O errors associated with fd0), even though I've never had a floppy drive in the system and it had never caused a problem before. It appears this is not an uncommon problem, see e.g. here and here, but its not obvious why I'd only experience this now with Fedora 9 an 10.

The command line workaround (install grub to the MBR using the grub shell with "grub --no-floppy," setup (hd0,0), etc, instead of using grub-install) is not ideal as it appears that any kernel update (e.g. when updating the system after a DVD upgrade) will run grub-install itself and fall foul of the problem.

In the end I had to switch off floppy support completely in the BIOS (even though no floppy drive or any associated cabels were present in my system) to solve this problem.

Upgrading from Fedora 8 -> Fedora 9, and then Fedora 9 -> Fedora 10 using the x86_64 DVD install/upgrade disks ultimately worked, in a fashion, but displayed some annoying features that reminded me why I switched to the yum upgrade method before.

The problem is that after "upgrading" and rebooting I found many packages (indeed, the majority) had not been updated to Fedora 9. I presume the reason is that a fully up-to-date Federa 8 system has packages that are more recent, with higher version numbers, than the original Fedora 9 DVD distribution, and that the DVD upgrade process then does not replace the fc8 packages with the fc9 packages.

I had to run "yum update" at least twice (why twice? I don't know why it didn't pick up all the packages that needed updating the first time) before the older Fedora 8 packages were replaced with normal fc9 packages. Even with a fast internet connection updating > 1000 packages takes a full day or so. I then had the same problem with Fedora 9 -> Fedora 10, where the situation was so bad that after the basic DVD upgrade firefox and konqueror simply didn't work at all. Then yet another day waiting for "yum update" to complete.

I did discover some useful yum tips here, in particular how to force yum-fastestmirror to retest the mirror speeds without doing "yum clean all." (Important if you've just spent several hours downloading hundreds of packages, but they haven't yet been installed before the transaction check found a problem, and you need to download more but the once-fast mirror you were downloading from is now incredibly slow.)

The update process was exacerbated by some odd changes the DVD upgrade made to my networking setup that basically messed up /etc/resolv.conf and my DNS configuration. It took me a while to work out that the "Error: Cannot find a valid baseurl for repo: fedora" was basically a DNS/dhclient problem. I don't remember DVD upgrades messing with network settings before, so I'm not sure how or why this happened.

To add insult to injury my rsync backup scripts then no longer worked because the newly installed Gvfs (specificaly ~/.gvfs) breaks rsync. The work-around is to add .gvfs to the rsync excludefile, but what a pain!

All in all a very tiring upgrade process, and all the more annoying because the exact same upgrades for i386/i686 work fine on my other machines. I presume part of the problem, in particular with the DVD upgrade, was leaving the upgrade so late after Fedora 9 and Fedora 10 had come out, so I may upgrade the x86_64 workstation to Fedora 11 relatively soon after it comes out. But on the other hand I don't like to upgrade to a new Fedora version before some of the kinks in the new version are worked out...