Fedora: A Mixed Blessing

Posted Wed, 10 Aug 2005 17:13:18 GMT to Posted in Tags , ,

Over the summer, I have been using 2 operating systems on a regular basis: Windows 2000, which has been running on my home machine for 3.5 years now, and Fedora, which is running on both my work machine and my campus machine. At the start of the summer they were both running Fedora Core 3. I had no problems with these set ups, as I didn’t need them to play media like movies or mp3s. These were development desktop systems and they worked well. The only big addition to my work machine was the inclusion of apt, because yum doesn’t want to work through the http proxy here for some reason (and yes, I did make sure to set it up so that it should).

Recently, I decided I wanted to upgrade from Core 3 to Core 4. I installed the main Fedora4.rpm (or whatever it is labeled as), pointed apt at Core 4 rpm repositories, and ran apt-get update followed by apt-get install. As the upgrade included a new version of gnome, and I wanted to test some modifications I made to my rc.local file, I decided to restart my machine as well. Logging in, I was faced with the X Windows manager, instead of Gnome. Seems apt-get dist-upgrade removed a bunch of the core gnome packages instead upgrading them. Performing apt-get remove gnome followed by apt-get install gnome however, didn’t make any difference. Finally, I discovered that gnome-session wasn’t installed. A quick apt-get install fixed that and everything was better.

On campus, I decided to upgrade using yum. This was worse than apt-get. It completely destroyed my system. And by completely, I mean COMPLETELY. I wasn’t even able to log in via the command line as it apparently decided to remove the default shells as well. Thankfully, There was very little information I actually needed saving, and a LiveCD allowed me to retrieve that. The system itself, however, got a complete reinstall. Hmmmmm… since nothing is basically being run on it now, maybe I should try another linux distro…

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  1. John said 252 days later:

    I have a related problem. I am upgrading from Fedora 3 to Fedora 4 on a coLinux system using the instructions at http://wiki.colinux.org/cgi-bin/FedoraHowTo The command

    apt-get dist-upgrade

    has decided to delete the following packages:

    apt rpm yum mozilla firefox

    This makes further upgrading a problem. At least with coLinux I can have two systems side by side so I will have to boot the old Fedora 3 system from a back up and mount the Fedora 4. I am not sure though, how to get the Fedora 3 to put e.g. rpm into the Fedora 4. Maybe I have to build that from source….

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