Upgrading to Fedora Core 6
I finally got around to upgrading my Dell to Fedora Core 6 using yum. My last attempt failed pretty miserably mainly because of some stupid package dependencies I couldn’t figure out how to resolve (something to do with initscripts, which was kind of what happened in my attempt to upgrade from FC4 to FC5). So instead of dealing with it, I simply shut it up… Here are the steps:
1. me@localhost$
rpm -ev fedora-release --nodeps
2. me@localhost$rpm -Uvh [url-to-fc6-release-notes]
3. me@localhost$rpm -Uvh [url-to-fc6-release]
4. me@localhost$yum clean all
5. me@localhost$yum -y update
By step 5, everything should’ve gone flawlessly, except, again, Fedora threw a fit on dependency problems such as bg5ps, gtkhtml and a couple of other packages. Again, instead of dealing with resolving them, I just removed them:
1. me@localhost$
yum remove bg5ps
2. …. (repeat step 1 until all problematic dependencies are removed)
Then everything was good. And as it turns out, the new kernel that came with FC6 (2.6.18-1.2798.fc6-i686) is capable of handling dual cpu systems, unlike kernels before that where I had to specifically update multi-processor capable kernels (kernel-smp). I wasted about 20 minutes trying to find/update something that never existed!
Finally, after reboot, I got my nice FC6 all up and running. Life was good except now VMWare refuses to launch. So I had to reinstall it because of the new kernel I installed. Unfortunately, VMWare couldn’t locate the new kernel’s c header library (usually installed at /usr/src/`uname -r`/include). But it wasn’t there!!! Even though I had the latest kernel, its c header library still could not be found! After some research, I finally was able to resolve that by force installing kernel and kernel-devel rpm files:
me@localhost$
rpm -Uvh --force [url-to-kernel-rpm-package]
Issue the command above for both the currentkernelandkernel-devel
Once VMWare got its kernel c header library, it was happy. And life was good again….
My next project with that machine is to upgrade its CPUs with a couple of nice Pentium 3 Slot 1 modules at the maximum clock speed the machine can handle (which is at around 1.1Ghz — fast compared to 450mhz I currently have). These types of CPUs are pretty hard to come by because Intel abandoned Slot 1 architecture a long time ago.
Fedora Core 6 upgrade made possible by this discussion thread at fedoraforum.org. VMWare troubleshooting and resolution made possible by this discussion thread on VMWare’s community site and this discussion thread on fedoraforum.org.
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