Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Upgrade FC from 6 to 7

I've recently (tonight) upgraded my laptop from Fedora Core 6 to Fedora 7.
I've a pretty complete installation of Fedora and everything worked almost perfectly during installation...

The procedure I used is:

  1. Double check /etc/fstab for any /dev/hdX reference
  2. # yum update
  3. # yum clean all
  4. # rpm -Uhv http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Fedora/i386/os/Fedora/fedora-release-7-3.noarch.rpm http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Fedora/i386/os/Fedora/fedora-release-notes-7.0.0-1.noarch.rpm
  5. # yum -y upgrade

I had some problems, well: minor problems that could stop an [unexperienced|lazy] linux user.

1. /etc/fstab
We could talk about the reliability of linux installations, but I won't. The upgrade from 6 to 7 could bring some annoying problems regarding devices... some devices changed since a driver in the kernel had upgraded, the result is that devices called: /dev/hdX are now called /dev/sdX. For this reason you should check your /etc/fstab for devices. I had only LVM devices and correctly labeled other devices, so this warning didn't touch me. But if a # grep hd /etc/fstab produces something to you, well, label records to something appropriate or upgrade will lock your box for a while.

4. rpm upgrade repos
remember to check YOUR system code:
PPC, x86_64 or i386
you really DON'T want to install some packages compiled on different architectures

5. yum -y upgrade
You could encounter some problems here, during the dependencies check... I'm very happy about the repository package system on linux boxes, dependencies are very well managed and getting an error here doesn't mean that linux is something wrong, it's simply double checking everything to make sure that everything will work correctly... I had some unresolved dependencies, due to the fact that I installed some extra packages to get some chess engines work on my laptop... to get out from this stale I decided to remove every package named...

the instruction:

# rpm -e python-cheetah python-setuptools PyOpenGL TurboGears python-turbocheetah pygtkglext glchess python-paste-script

resolved any dependency problem.

So I run again:
# yum -y upgrade 

from the command prompt (outside the window manager, BTW), after some time
and 1gb of packages downloaded, my system was upgraded.

Post installation:
Some package have still the fc6 code in their name, on this laptop are:

# rpm -qa | grep -c fc6
55

but a note on redhat.com assures this is perfectly normal for packages that didn't need a rebuild.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

ext3_abort

on a linux machine I was experiencing this error

hdc: task_in_intr: status=0x59 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error }
hdc: task_in_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=155768546, sector=155768546
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
end_request: I/O error, dev hdc, sector 155768546

Seems definitely an hardware error, but I've some reasonable doubts about drivers.

...but then, after some trivial operations on computer, this error appeared, locking the system drive "ro" and causing many errors operationals errors:

EXT3-fs error (device dm-0): ext3_find_entry: reading directory #19432083 offset 0
Aborting journal on device dm-0.
journal commit I/O error
ext3_abort called.
EXT3-fs error (device dm-0): ext3_journal_start_sb: Detected aborted journal
Remounting filesystem read-only
ext3_abort called.

a reboot solved, almost temporary the problem...