Upgrading Fedora using yum

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This page contains information explaining how to upgrade Fedora using yum.

Although upgrades with yum have been tested and work, live upgrades are not recommended by the Fedora Project. If you are not prepared to resolve issues on your own if things break, you should probably use the recommended installation methods instead.

The recommended installation method is with a boot media with the Anaconda installer as detailed in the Installation Guide. PreUpgrade is a slightly different upgrade method where the all packages are downloaded before the system is rebooted into the Anaconda installer.

When upgrading with yum you don't get any help from Anaconda, but if you are lucky you might be able to upgrade systems remotely over ssh and with limited downtime. (You will still need to reboot to get the new kernel and system libraries/services running) Rebooting after such an upgrade is always very exciting.

A live upgrade with yum usually works well with a typical installation and when following the advice below.

Contents

Participate

If you are upgrading using Yum and it shows up any general dependency issues, please file them in http://bugzilla.redhat.com. But please read this page and all references pages and search the mailing list archives before filing bugs. And of course, please help keeping this page updated.

If you want to help make live upgrades work smoothly, join the SIGs/LiveUpgrade Live Upgrade Special Interest Group.

Instructions to upgrade using yum

0. Back up your system

Back up any personal data to an external hard drive or to another machine. If there is some unrecoverable error that requires a fresh install, you don't want to lose any data.

1. Read about common problems

Further down in this page there's a list of common problems for specific versions. Some of them require attention before the upgrade.

General advice on upgrading Fedora can be found on the Upgrading page. You should also read the Installation Guide and Release Notes for the version you upgrade to - they contain important information regarding upgrading issues. Finally, check the list of Common F12 bugs.

2. Clean Stuff

Review and remove all .rpmsave and .rpmnew files before and after upgrading. (And if you have selinux enabled then remember to check security context if you move config files around.)

Find unused config files
Merge and resolve the changes found by the following script: for a in $(find /etc /var -name '*.rpm?*'); do diff -u $a ${a%.rpm?*}; done.

Now is a good time to remove packages you don't use - especially non-standard packages.

Find and review "unused" packages
You can find packages not required by other packages with the tool package-cleanup from the yum-utils package: yum install yum-utils; package-cleanup --leaves. These packages could be candidates for removal, but check if you use them directly or if they are used by applications not backed by rpm packages. Remove them with yum remove package-name-and-version.
Find and review "lost" packages
You can find orphaned packages (ie packages not in the repositories anymore) with: package-cleanup --orphans. This will also show packages which have been partially uninstalled but where the "%postun" script failed.

Make sure you have the yum-fastestmirror package installed so that yum uses the "best" mirror. 

yum install yum-fastestmirror

Then remove all traces of the version you are leaving from the yum cache in /var/cache/yum. 

yum clean all

3. Switch repositories

Update the packages that decide which yum repositories to use. 

rpm -Uhv ftp://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/<ReleaseNumber>/Fedora/<Arch>/os/Packages/fedora-release-*.noarch.rpm

(The architecture doesn't matter for this noarch package.)

Note: Some users have reported that attempting to download through rpm returns a response 550 and "transfer failed" messages. If this is the case, you can download the rpms and install locally. Consider: 

wget ftp://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/<ReleaseNumber>/Fedora/<Arch>/os/Packages/fedora-release-*.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh fedora-release-*.noarch.rpm

Make sure the new repo files isn't placed as .rpmnew files, perhaps by 

mv /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo.rpmnew /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-updates.repo
mv /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo.rpmnew /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo

If you have 3rd party repositories configured, you may need to adjust them for the new Fedora version. If you switch from one Fedora release to another there is often nothing that needs to be done. If you switch to Rawhide from a standard Fedora release (or vice versa) then you most of the time need to install the Rawhide release RPMs from the 3rd party repository as well (or the standard ones, if switching back).

Note that the upgrade is likely to fail if there are outdated dependencies from packages not backed by a yum repository or backed by a repository which isn't ready for the new version.

4. Do the upgrade

If using selinux make sure it is in permissive mode - neither disabled nor enforcing.

It is a good idea to do the upgrade outside the graphical environment. Log out of your graphical desktop and then go to a text console 

ctrl + alt + F2

log in as root, and go into runlevel 3 

telinit 3
Once a live upgrade is started do not stop the upgrade by rebooting, killing the process, or by any other method until it is complete, doing so will cause the affected system to be in a mixed state. Partially the old release and partially the new release. In this state the system will not be reliable and will not operate as expected. The only way to recover from this is to reinstall if it occurs.
Update important packages first
You can start try to update the update machinery first with yum update rpm\* yum\*. Another idea is to start with glibc. In both cases dependencies might however expand it to an almost full upgrade anyway. And doing a full upgrade might be more safe. YMMV. (In particular, do not upgrade rpm and yum separately if upgrading to a system with a different version of python e.g. 2.4 to 2.5.)

Upgrade all packages with 

yum upgrade

yum might complain about conflicts or requirements. That is probably because you have used non-standard repositories or installed non-standard packages manually. Try to guess which packages cause the problem (or at least is a part of the dependency chain) - uninstall them and try again. Remember to install the packages again if they are essential.

Ensure that all (new) essential packages from the new version is installed with 

yum groupupdate Base

You might want to update other groups too, see 

yum grouplist

For example 

yum groupupdate "GNOME Desktop Environment" \
"Development Tools" "Server Configuration Tools" \
"Hardware Support" "Sound and Video" \
"Graphical Internet" "Fonts" \
"Games and Entertainment" "Printing Software" \
"Administration Tools" "Office/Productivity" "System Tools"

5. Preparing for reboot

Before booting you should usually install the bootloader from your new grub by running 

/sbin/grub-install BOOTDEVICE

- where BOOTDEVICE usually is /dev/sda (If you get an error '/dev/sda does not have any corresponding BIOS drive' from that, then try /sbin/grub-install --recheck /dev/sda.)

Also, the order of init scripts could have changed from the previous version. A command to reset the order is: 

cd /etc/rc.d/init.d; for f in *; do /sbin/chkconfig $f resetpriorities; done

Again, run package-cleanup --orphans to find packages that hasn't been upgraded.

Version specific notes

From pre-release

If you are upgrading to a final release from an alpha, beta, preview, or other Rawhide release, please see Upgrading from pre-release to final.

Fedora 11 -> Fedora 12

Fedora 10 -> Fedora 11 

yum update rpm

YumRepo Error: All mirror URLs are not using ftp, http[s] or file.
 Eg. </metalink>/

This is 498720. Workaround is to manually edit the URL in /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo as described at https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/2009-June/msg00783.html

Fedora 9 -> Fedora 10

Fedora 8 -> Fedora 9

Fedora 7 -> Fedora 8 

yum groupinstall sound-and-video gnome-desktop (if you are using Gnome)
yum groupinstall sound-and-video kde-desktop (if you are using KDE)
yum install libflashsupport paman padevchooser

rpm -e --noscripts avahi-0.6.17-1.fc7

yum erase dbus.i386

yum shell
> erase dbus.i386
> update
> run

yum erase kde{accessibility{,-devel},base,edu,graphics,multimedia{,-extras},network,sdk,utils{,-devel},webdev}.i386

yum erase beryl\*

Fedora Core 6 -> Fedora 7

Fedora Core 5 -> Fedora Core 6

Fedora Core 4 -> Fedora Core 5

Fedora Core 3 -> Fedora Core 4

yum update yum

Problems: 

yum update kernel
reboot
yum remove kernel-2.6.11\*FC3\*
yum upgrade
reboot

Reading repository metadata in from local files This means you have too much crap in your rpmdb and it's taking a while to go through it. Check out how many kernels you have installed: rpm -q kernel kernel-smp and remove the old ones you may also try running: rpm --rebuilddb and see if it helps any. I've found that removing old kernels and rebuilding the rpmdb helped this problem. 

yum remove perl.i386
TODO: Add list of bonobo i386 packages to remove here

koffice was removed from Fedora Core and not moved to extras - so there's no way to complete an upgrade to FC4 without removing it. run: 

yum remove koffice

then your update should complete.

Seems related to bug 155730 -- Maybe a update to the "rpm-4.3.3-3.0.fc3" (currently in updates-testing) might solve this. Ugly workaround (to be done as root): 

: > /var/log/lastlog

warning: rpmts_HdrFromFdno: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID db42a60e
public key not available for <some_package>
Retrieving GPG key from file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora

The GPG key at file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora (0x4F2A6FD2)
is already installed but is not the correct key for this package.
Check that this is the correct key for the "Fedora Core 4 - i386 - Base" repository.

Edit /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo and replace the line 

gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-fedora

with: 

gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY

diskspacecheck=0
</code> in <code>/etc/yum.conf</code>.
The RPM transaction will need a lot of diskspace temporarily (much more than one might think), so be careful.
Don't forget to remove that later after the upgrade.

* Yum complains about files conflicting in the GCC package.  This system was upgraded from Fedora Core 1.  Remove the gcc32 package:
<pre>
sudo rpm -e gcc32

sudo depmod -ae -F /boot/System.map-[your <code>uname -a</code> kernel version here]

Fedora Core 2 -> Fedora Core 3

Go here for most of this info: http://linux.duke.edu/~skvidal/misc/fc2-fc3-update-with-yum.txt

Fedora Core 1 -> Fedora Core 2

Just Upgrade using anaconda - save yourself a world of pain. But if you really want to try, there's these hints by Seth Vidal: http://linux.duke.edu/~skvidal/misc/fc1-fc2-yum-hints.txt

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