Monday, 19 November 2007

Fedora 8 Upgrade: Not so Smooth

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I'm a fan of Fedora, so I was happy to see Fedora 8 hit the streets. I've tried to move to it on two different boxes: one at work, and one at home. My efforts at work succeeded with one issue (the java one below). At home, though, I've met some serious difficulties. I'm installing onto a Dell E510, which is pretty common. From the volume of "me too's" on the Fedora bug tracker, I gather these issues are widespread.

I've encountered three problems total:

ISOLINUX hangs during boot after loading initrd.img with the message "Ready." See bug 239585
Anaconda hangs in some upgrades when dependency resolution reaches 26% (or 99% for some people). See bug 372011
Existing Sun JRE's have some awt problem with libX11 in Fedora 8, where GUI's fail with "xcb_xlib.c:50: xcb_xlib_unlock: Assertion 'c->xlib.lock' failed.". See Java bug 6532373 and Fedora bug 254144

I've never heard a good explanation for the first problem. I was able to solve it by hitting tab at the Fedora installer menu and adding "edd=skipmbr" to the linux command line. Others have reported using other options like "acpi=off" and a few more others, but these didn't help me.

The second issue has me stopped. This appears to be a bug in yum, and you hit it depending on what packages you are upgrading. I got lucky at work and unlucky at home. There appears to be an installation update at that some people are reporting success with available here. Unfortuantely, using these updates requires either accessing them via the network during the install or mounting a drive with the image on it. My box doesn't have a floppy and I don't use dhcp and my attempts to configure the installer with my networking config haven't gone swimmingly. So I'm stuck. I could probably get this working with some research into using Anaconda updates, but this exceeds my activation energy level at the moment.

The java issue occurs if Java finds the Xinerama extension, at which point it does something broken with locking and triggers the error. People have figured out they can work around it by faking out java into not finding this extension by using a sed script to replace the text it looks for in the binary library: sed -i 's/XINERAMA/FAKEEXTN/g' $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/i386/xawt/libmawt.so

All in all, this is the most painful upgrade I've had yet with Fedora, which I've been with full time at home and work since Fedora 4. I've had some issues with sound cards and SE Linux, but nothing that basically prevented me from using it. My advice to people is to wait until this stuff is all worked out, unless you enjoy troubleshooting for the sport of it. A good page to look at for the quick facts is the Fedora 8 Common Bugs page.

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